 to Pure Dog Talk. I am your host Laura Reeves and you guys, I am so excited. We have had the opportunity to talk to some amazing authors about some amazing books and today is no different. I'm going to show this to you in the camera. Porter and Midge out and about. And this is the Puppy Adventures of Porter and Midge, a book about two puppies who go on adventures written by dog people to share with the general public. And I am so excited. So Giselle Nevada and Jenny Chen, welcome. I'm so excited to have you join me. Thank you for having us. So cool. So Jenny, you and I have talked before and we have had many conversations about the idea of changing the conversation within the general public. And getting people information that meets them where they live, where they are. And I really feel as I read through this book, that's really what you guys are trying to do. Yeah? Oh, thank you. Now I'm going to cry. No crying. There is literally no crying in baseball or dog shows or at all. Here's the joy. It is something, you know, because as dog people, we live, breathe. I mean, these dogs are our lives. Our entire lives revolve around them. So our way of communication is certainly at a different level because we've got the depth of knowledge that the general public doesn't necessarily have. You know, they might have a couple pets throughout their lifetimes where, you know, we've got dogs that we train, show, you know, live with us, live with somebody else and those sorts of things. So being able to communicate to someone who can only take a tiny snippet of what we understand in the dog world is so difficult. And then trying to translate that to a child who may not have all of the skills, the communication skills, the mobility skills, you know, the ability to piece everything together. How do we communicate these ideas to kids, you know, to this different audience so that as they grow and they learn, like, these are the things that are really important. How do I put myself in a puppy shoe? What does a puppy see when they're out in public? So that's, yeah, we're very passionate about this. I love it. I love it. So, Giselle, give us an introduction to yourself, a little 411, as they say. Sure. Hi, I'm Giselle Navada. I've owned Mastiff's for over 20 years now. My first two Mastiffs were actually from Rescue, had behavior issues, all of that. My second Mastiff was a foster fail. And he was too afraid to come into the house when he first got him. So we worked with lots and lots of trainers, at least in Murphy's case. And what really got him out of the show was actually having a job. And in this case, he loved pulling a cart. And when he had a cart on, he was a completely different dog. And after that, he just got better and better and more confident and more confident. That's so amazing. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, it was with Dick Schumer, who is one of Jenny's mentors who got him out of a shell. So, well, anyway, after dealing with those two rescues, were there all their behavior and medical issues, it really inspired me to find a well bred Mastiff for my next puppy. And I met Karen Flocker, who is, she's no longer breed. She's New Beginnings Mastiffs. And I contacted her because she had taken several Mastiffs to obedience titles. And that was something that I always wanted to do. Yeah. Yeah. And she was also, as a breeder, like that was like 20 plus years ago. She was really, really into the importance of like puppy socialization and that rules of seven thing about. And so, and so, you know, we chose her because I really had a passion for like wanting my dogs to work and do things. So, fast forward to now, I am on my sixth and seventh Mastiff, both of which have working titles. So. And, and so I love that the characters in the book, the dogs, Porter and Midge represent your guys as breeds, right? A Mastiff, and a great mountain dog. So, phenomenal. Jenny. They were actually, go ahead. No, you're fine. Porter and Midge were, we got Porter and Midge at the same time, actually. So, we by accident. And we, Jenny was here in Austin at the time. So, we actually socialized them in many of the spots that are in the book. We took so many pictures. Little life true story. It actually is. It actually is. Well, the story arc is not true, but most of the places that we're in are in the book is places that Porter and Midge actually went to. So. That is so fabulous. Okay. So, Jenny, you are perhaps better known in the Lausian community, but talk to us about your swissie journey and kind of what brought you specifically to this book. So, I started in swissies about two decades ago as well and quickly followed with the Lausian. And I did get, you know, my greatest was my very first dog. And I got him thinking, oh, yeah, I'm going to do obedience. I'm going to do all the stuff. And one of the litter mates happened to live close by and they knew Dick Schumer. And that's, I think the first time that Giselle and I kind of met. I mean, we saw each other all around town and things like that. And Dick was amazing. He was a man that had new fees. He did service work with his new fees. And the part that was so critical in his education, not just that he was the most giving person, extremely knowledgeable, but he had a knack for helping you understand what the dog is feeling, putting the dog in your shoes. If I was a dog, what is the picture that I see? How is my physical body? How was my, you know, carriage, my tone? How is that communicating to a dog? He was just incredible, just a really incredible trainer. And he's been a pivotal person in many people's lives. He's just, you know, really incredible. But that's, that's one of the places that Giselle and I met. So I started in greater space. The Lausian came quickly after. And now I lost my train of thought. Oh, yeah, I'm supposed to be talking about my. I want to know about the journey because, again, Jenny, you and I, our point of connection is that outreach to junkie public, right? So, so talk to me about your train of thought to get you to this book. And this is your second book. Am I understanding that right? Are you working? Second book is written in the process of illustration. And we stumbled across this book because when I was in Austin, I started Keep Austin Dog Friendly. There's a list of all the dog friend places, all the events, we would do things. I mean, this is well before social media. I mean, this was back in the day because we were so interested in making sure that dogs are being, they're being raised, being socialized, understanding the world is not bad. Because that's, that's what a breed is, the breed or swift, they can be suspicious. I mean, this is a breed that can be a little bit of loose. They have a stranger danger. Are you my friend or not? If you're my friend, we're best buds. If you're kind of weird, I'm a look at you, sit here. So it is a breed that does need that socialization. You absolutely have to do it and often happen to be the place to do it because it was so dog friendly. And so that's one of the reasons why Giselle and I just started taking our puppies out and by accident, I mean, we did not intend on getting midge. She came into her home because the breeder is like, this is a really nice dog. I would like her to go to a show home. Can you come pick her up on some? And I said, okay, I can come. I'll get on a plane and I'll pick her up. So that's how midge kind of accidentally came into our lives. It wasn't planned. And then we just started going out to places and people we know. If you scroll back through my Facebook and some other pictures, you're going to see a lot of these scenes, very similar scenes. And if you look real closely, yeah, you will see a lot of people who are in the dog world also drawn in. They may not be the characters, but they may be the people, you know, walking around on the street, you know, the veterinarians, you know, other people in other dogs that you may already know from the show world. So we tried to incorporate a lot of that. We also want to incorporate a lot of the breeds that aren't as well known, like we have a boovie in there. I mean, they're not Holly. I'm like, perfect. Yeah. So we really wanted to get this booked out and we really wanted to speak to a different audience because it's not just, oh, this is what I'm going to do with an adult. This is what we need to do with a puppy. And now you layer on a kid. How do you get a kid to understand that? Because they don't understand the same things we understand. They're not able to pick up the visual cues, the body language that dogs have, as well as humans. But how do we introduce them to this idea of socialization? I just think it is adorable for starters. But it's, so talk about the evolution from, because there's a lot of people, I see a lot, social media, Jenny, you're always on social, you see this, everybody has these great ideas, right? And some of them come to fruition and some of them don't. So talk about your guys's process. Like you work together to do this. What is the process to actually go from, I have this really great idea to, I have this really like incredibly adorable book. Oh man, I think it was one of my, she just messaged me, she's like, you know what quarter mid sounds like? A book. That's how it started. And I think she said something along the lines of maybe we should write a children's book. And me back then I said yes to everything. I mean, I'm a little bit like that now still. I don't say no. Pretty much everything's yes. You want to, and then I'm like, yes, how do we make it happen? And at the time I was doing a lot of writing. I was in the content creation side of things and marketing. So I was like, well, this is kind of fun. And this is also doing that evolution, you know, in my professional life, where I work in data. We talk about technical things. It's very dense. It's complicated. But this is a totally different audience. And I'm like, this sounds like a fun challenge. How do you get something so complex like dog behavior and socialization and training and just still that to a point where a child can actually relate to it without using all the technical terms that we use in training? Right, right. So Giselle, what put that little bean in your brain, right? The bee in the bonnet. Well, the pictures that Jenny was taking of Porter and Midge were just so, so cute. It had to be a book. And I think we first started with, let's just take the pictures in and like do some sort of blog or something along those lines. I started talking to a friend of mine who is a neuros biologist in UT Austin. And she was like, well, I have this friend who works in UT and she wants to actually start illustrating. That's Anne. And this is Anne's person. Yeah, and she wants to try to do this and we're like, oh, let's do it. Let's see how we can do this. And so we met Anne and it just, we all hit it off and eight years later. It definitely takes a village. We are at the Kentucky Anne, a cluster of dog shows. And I'm talking to Dr. Karen Potter. She is a German wire hair pointer breeder, Trupanian breeder. And she's also a veterinarian. And Karen's going to talk about what Trupanian means to her as a breeder and also what it means for her as a veterinarian. When I became a Trupanian breeder and I sent my letters out, I knew that they were going with 30 days of coverage had one of my owners have an emergency with them. That's comforting to me as a breeder to know that they can get help as a veterinarian. There are many cases where we have to make decisions on how to treat things based on financial restraints. And when the financial restraints come into play, we can't always do absolutely everything for that pet. So if my puppies are covered, at least for those first 30 days, I know that if they get sick, they can get the best possible care. So talk about each of the steps like you take them through vaccinations and going to the vet and learning to sit quietly. And these are things that children are going to be involved with. And their parents are going to be reading them the book, right? And so the parents are getting the information as well. Jenny, go ahead. Well, we wrote it because these are typical things that we do want puppies to go through. And we do want the kids to understand also what's happening, right? Because they're like, we're going to the vet and like, well, why? Well, they need to be vaccinated before they go out in public and make sure that they're safe and they're protected. And, you know, the other things that we went from step to step. And it our real life didn't always happen in this order. But we wanted to make sure like there was a goal for the child, right? I want to be in this grade. I want to take my puppy. But it's not just, you know, I do it without any work. We also wanted to instill that like, it has a process. There's things that you have to do. There's behaviors you have to learn. Because back then, it was very much like puppy obedience was to stay calm. It wasn't common public, you know, relax, you know, common command and that like that type of thing, which when I was doing a lot of training for general manners and things like that, those were the questions that we were getting. They're like, well, my dog sits, but it's also a pest and constantly just is always doing things around the house and can't calm. I'm like, okay, because you didn't actively teach him to calm. And like, so that's why we went the route that we did saying, okay, here's all the new places we go. But we're going to focus on one skill and the skill, the theme kind of for this book is like, you know, the common public, don't be too afraid to calm, you can get excited to stay calm. So. And so at the back of the book, one of the things that I think is just genius is a checklist. So talk about that. So, um, yeah, we had a checklist, like we had a real life checklist. No, I'm saying like, it was perfect. It's what I've seen it in a very similar type of thing, like training therapy dogs, stuff like that. Yep. Yep. And we wanted to make it kind of like an activity because there are a lot of checklists and some breeders even send their puppies home with these like, hey, you've got to see 100 people with the first 10 days and all of this stuff. And so we wanted to have an activity so the kids can say, okay, this is what I'm working for because this is very integrated. And that's why we have the activity books too. It's not just this is your bedtime story. It's how do you apply this to real life? How do you look at the things on the list and say, okay, my dog has they have they've been on an elevator? Have they been to an airport? Like here's all the lists of things they can expose themselves to when they're ready at their own time. And so that's why we wanted to include the checklist because it wasn't just follow this book. This is a training manual. It's just how to do it in the different places. Now here's a checklist of other places you can go, other things that you can see. Right. So Giselle, and I just wanted to thank by the way that that wonderful, wonderful list was actually written by Virginia Wind, who is a master of person. And so I wanted to make sure that people knew that. So okay, thank you Virginia. My literally my question was, and where does the list come from? Virginia Wind. So talk to me on your end, Giselle, what are the pieces that stand out to you in the book as just being like super impactful for children or the ones that meant the most to you personally? So the one thing that we are getting a lot of feedback on is that kids are actually wanting to work with their dogs. We've actually sent, I think we sold possibly about one or 200 books during our advanced, advanced sales. And all the parents are coming back and they're like, they love it. And one of the things that I love that Anne did was she included so many different types of people in there. So it's very inclusive. Yes. It's very inclusive in terms of body type, etc. And what I really love about it is it's not just like, okay, expose a person to someone with no hair. These are real people. And I love the fact that I can open any page of this book. And I know everyone that's it. Oh, I think that's really amazing. And I have to tell you, I was really struck by the inclusivity. I thought that was amazingly well done. And I just think that, you know, as we're talking to children, we have families that probably got a dog during the pandemic because everyone did. They're struggling maybe with some of these issues. And even, I think, and to speak to me, you guys as particularly Jenny as a trainer, I feel like there's things in here that you can apply even if it's not a baby puppy. Oh, absolutely. These are life skills. And especially when the dogs get around that teenage day and they pretend they have never been trained a day in their life, especially at the national when it's being recorded. Yeah. In front of God and everybody. Exactly. But, you know, we feel like this is a foundational skill. Like I stopped using the term like take your dog to puppy class. I was saying, here's the skills that you need. You need, you know, calm, bite inhibition, you know, rewarding when they're not jumping. Like these are just the skills that we need. And how do we build that in, you know, not dragging you down the streets? Yeah, absolutely. So it's very much like I view this book like even if you didn't get a dog as a young puppy, you can still teach them. You can still form those habits. You know, we've gotten dogs at an older age as well. And we go back and we do this. We do couch training. If you want to be on the couch or calm, that's the rules. There's no jumping on the couch or she go downstairs. I have to admit, I everybody else has like their perfect like place command of my command in my house. If the dogs because I have wire hair pointers, right? So they're crazy. And so if I need the dogs to be calm, I say, go get on the couch. And that's their place command, right, is just go get over there and lie down. I don't care, you know, just stay there. Right. And I think that no matter what you pick, pick a chair, pick a bed, pick a whatever, right? That ability to put a dog somewhere and like have it in its position. Yes. Yep. And one of the other feedback that we got on the book is the socialization list is actually good for babies too. So I'm sorry, go ahead. So children. A lot of the moms came back with that. So I love it. I love it. I mean, I say it all the time, kids, dogs and men. She just got a firm, fair and consistent all the way across the board. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The feedback that we've gotten has just been really great, you know, because there's not a lot of these types of conversations that we have with kids, you know, we say, hey, tell the dog to sit in the child's sit. Okay. Well, how about the rest of it? I mean, their lives, their behaviors more than just a handful of commands, like we need to teach them these other habits and really build them in at a young age. Well, and I really liked the, like there's boundary building, you know, there's all of these kinds of things that, that are useful, as you say, the moms are replying for their kids too. Okay. So tell us a little bit, Giselle, go ahead and take us through like just a brief review of the whole out and about adventure from we go to the vet's office to get our vaccines and our end goal is to go to the parade, right? Yes. Yes. So basic synopsis there. Sure. So the main characters of the book are Laura and CJ. CJ was actually named after my breeder son. So back then we didn't have any nieces or nephews to actually use for this. So they want to join the Independence Day Parade. And so their, their camp counselor says, well, your dogs need training before you do that. They can't be afraid of things. And so how do we do that? And the, the, the basically the book takes them to a whole bunch of different places and teaches them, you know, how to introduce their dogs to new and exciting things more or less. We went through, we did a, we have a scene in South Congress in Austin. We went to Dorsey, what's her name? Barger? Is that right? How far? Farms. Farms. Where we got to really cute. Yeah. Yeah. And the comments where we didn't have Gustavo the goose in there. So Jenny, we missed that one. Sorry. Sorry. So then we did like a beach scene, a water scene. And then finally at the end of the, at the end of it, you see the dogs actually up there on the float. You know, chests held high, chins held high, you know, doing well with all the commotion that happened. I mean, that was one of the things I was like, okay, so this is such a, I think a really relatable thing for kids and adults, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Go ahead, Giselle. No, you're good. Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do with the rest of the series of the books. We have more than one. We're going to try to focus on one foundational skill in each book and take the kids through a story arc to teach them how to, how that skill is useful in real life. So Giselle, I'm pretty sure you're reading my mind because literally talk to me about what we can be seeing going forward. And so how many skills, sets, books do you think are in your brains? Well, at least right now, we have the second book, which is actually called The Puppy Adventures of Ported Midge, Pause at Attention. And what it does is it's going to be teaching the importance of checking in with their owners. And the story arc for this particular, the next book, will be taking them through having to do community service. And as part of the community service, the kids are like, hey, can we do, can we take our dogs as well? And so their trainer actually takes them to different places where they can meet dogs that work and, and each of these people, including Dick Schumer, by the way, who's in that book, yeah, is going to teach them how to, why checking in is important for that particular job. So we're really, really excited about it. It's very, very cute. And then, and then the other thing that we are sort of working on right now as well, is that we got feedback that this is for seven plus, you know, seven years old plus, but we want something for, for little kids as well. So we're actually writing a rhyming book on just kid safety. So yes, I will tell you my very first job when I was in college and my internship, literally my internship in college was working for the Salt Lake County Animal Shelter and going to schools and doing presentations on animal safety and animal care. And I love that animal safety component, you know, the littles, we'd go to the kindergarten classes or whatever, and they really, that's so, so, so important for littles. Yeah, yeah. So we're hoping that both books will come out by the end of the year as well. So. And Eric can listen to it. I mean, we'll put it, we'll put a link, but for those that won't go to the website because they're just listening on their phone. Where are they going to find this? Where are they going to be able to buy this for their nieces, nephews, kids, grandkids, you name it? Our books are available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, pretty much all the big online retailers, but we would also request that people ask their local bookstores to order it because they will have access through their distributor. So support your local bookstores. Yes, support your local bookstore. And Jenny, I assume that you guys have spoken to AKC education department and made this available. No. Sorry, I'm busy. I will get to it after national. I will. I will. I know. I just know that I did a really great interview with the gal who's running that education department. And this, I said the same thing to my other author that I talked to. These are the kind of things that AKC can help get into classrooms, right? And I think that that is such a great option. Thank you. I mean, the other things I wanted to just kind of point out in the book was not only did we want to celebrate like puppies and socialization, all the fun stuff, we wanted to celebrate people in dogs. So when you look at the other books, you're going to see people like there's a Bouvier pulling the cart in the first book. That's a real dog, a very famous agility Bouvier. But we wanted to celebrate these dogs, these people, because it's not just like, okay, they're getting club awards and stuff. The people who are not impure red dogs don't get to see that. Like the, I don't recall how many titles the smooth collie has, but he's a lot. It sure comes hardcore. A lot. One of the highest, like most decorated collies like, and they deserve that recognition too, right? The working and seeing that thing dogs at work and all these other breeds that you don't see every day that you'd have to go out and search for. So yes, there is a Louchin in the first book. There will be one in the second book, but I didn't want to celebrate those rare breeds and all of the people like the immense amount of people. It wasn't just like Giselle and I one day said, Hey, we're going to write a book, you know, for kids about dog training. It is the years of coaching the mentoring that we have gotten across the different venues that we really wanted to celebrate and say, Hey, like, y'all had an impact on our lives, you had an impact on our dog's life. And what can we do to impact the next generation? I love that. Absolutely love that. Ladies, thank you very, very much, everybody. Check it out. And I first see a lot of children's books in people's Christmas lists. So thank you. And just our website is porteredandmidge.com. Porter and Midge.com. We will link it. And Instagram and Facebook is also portered and Midge. So I love it. All right, we will have all the social up. And good job, ladies. Well done. Thank you.