First, thanks so much for your comments about the podcast, they are extremely helpful. Keep them coming, I'll summarize what has come in at the end of next week (seems like one votes for one host or two hosts votes are about 50/50, same with whether the show could charge a fee or not....) I'll keep you posted. Here's some more information from the IFAAB meetings in Tucson. There were two very interesting talks about breed recognition and breed-based behavior predictions. Victoria Voith, one of the first board certified veterinary behaviorists in the country, enrolled us in a study she is doing on breed identification. Given that breed bans are based on, well, breed identification, she and others are gathering breed identifications from a total of 1,000 people. We all took the survey, Read More
More on Scent Marking in Dogs: Lisberg Study #2
Great comments about who goes when and where, keep it up. I love hearing from you. It is truly amazing how little we know about dog behavior, isn't it? But here's some more of Anneke's results, this time from good-ole-fashioned, ethological studies observing animals in their natural environment--in this case, the dog park. Dr. Lisberg observed olfactory investigation and urination at the entrance to a popular dog park, recording who urinated when and where, and who did Ano-Genital investigation (AG), or sniffed each other's butts. She found that males and females were equally likely to urinate immediately upon entering the park, but that males often urinated more frequently than females. No surprise there. "Resident" males (dogs already there) counter marked (over or adjacent marked) Read More
Scent Marking in Dogs
Here's a brief post from one of the many fascinating talks at IFAAB... brief because I'm afraid I came home with a killer influenza, couldn't even stand up on Tuesday, much less sit up. So boring to be sick, seems like I've been sick that too much this winter. Enough already. One of the best talks at IFAAB (Interdisciplinary Forum on Applied Animal Behavior) was from Dr. Anneke Lisberg whose dissertation was on scent marking and urine investigation in dogs. [And was also my Teaching Assistant for several years, a truly great house sitter and now a dear friend and colleague, so am I objective? Not even close. But based on the comments after her talk, I'm quite sure the rest of the group concurs with my assessment.] Anneke and I talked long and hard about what she should study for her Read More
Why are some People more comfortable around animals?
There's an interesting discussion going on, on-line, in my university course right now. One of the students asked why some people like non-human animals more than they do members of their own species. There are some extremely interesting comments posted to that question, especially about animals being 'innocents' rather than moral agents who can choose to be cruel. The question, and other potential answers, reminded me of an essay I wrote in Dog is My Co-Pilot, titled "Love is Never Having to Say Anything at All." In it I argue that one of the reasons we love dogs so much is that, well, because they can't talk. As I write in the essay: "Words may be wonderful things, but they carry weight with them, and there's a great lightness of being when they are discarded." Of course, this Read More
Comparative and Canine Cognition; Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes
I just finished Everett's book Don't Sleep, There are Snakes, and a more thought-provoking book I can't imagine. As I mentioned in my earlier blog, the author spent much of his life over the last 30 years with a hunter-gatherer tribe, the Piraha, in the Amazon basin. Everett began his work as a missionary and a linguist; his work with the Piraha changed his faith, but not his dedication to studying language. What makes the book so interesting is his discussion about what the Piraha culture has to say about the derivation of human language. Everett is very clear: he argues persuasively that both Chomsky and Skinner got it wrong (in relation to language). In brief, Chomsky argued that language is innate in humans, and that there are universal 'laws' of grammar that are passed down Read More
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