Please don't run Rachel Alexandra in the Belmont. If you don't follow horse racing, that request if meaningless. If you do, you know that the Belmont is the third race in the Triple Crown, the be-all and-end of American Thoroughbred horse racing. You also know that "fillies" rarely win horse races (could we call her a mare, please?) and that Rachel's win yesterday in the 2nd leg of the Triple Crown was historic. What you may or may not know is the depth of controversies that currently runs rampant (pun intended) in the world of horse racing about the welfare of the horses involved. My knowledge of the arguments for and against horse racing have recently been enriched by the term papers written in the class I teach at UW- Madison. Each student has to write two papers about the biological Read More
Reinforcing Fear II, Thunder Phobia III
Earlier I wrote that you "can't reinforce fear" and used a dog who is afraid of thunder as an example. For so long we have been told that we'll just make our dogs worse if we try to comfort them when they run to us in fear when the skies rumble and the rain falls. In this context, it really is doubtful that comforting your dog is going to make him worse. As I said previously, fear is designed to be aversive, and dogs who are terrified of thunder aren't going to get worse because you stroked their belly. Indeed, there is research that some interpret to mean that our petting has little effect at all: As I mentioned in a 2008 Bark column (and an alert reader posted), Dreschel & Granger (Applied Animal Beh Science, 2005) found that cortisol levels, a measure of stress, did not decrease Read More
Tulip’s Tulips
As promised, I'm going to write soon about helping dogs with Thunder Phobia (and the very interesting issue of reinforcing fear and/or the behavior that expresses it) , but I couldn't resist posting a few photos from this morning. Here's Mr. Will, front and center as usual, as I try to take a photo of the tulips that are blooming over Tulip's grave. I named Tulip, in part, after the white tulips I planted in honor of my first Great Pyrenees Bo Peep. We buried Tulip with the hundreds of fresh tulips her admirers had spontaneously brought to a celebration of her life a few hours before we put her down. Tulip the dog may have been all white, but her spirit was a rainbow of colors. The flowers are planted over her grave, in the place that she spent so many hours, chewing on bones, Read More
More Wackadoo Medicine for Dogs
I promised I'd write about the last alternative treatment that I use for my dogs: homeopathic medicine. I'm totally comfortable with someone calling this wackadoo and weirdo, because even I am not comfortable with the explanation given by proponents of the treatment. I'm fine with the first part, in which preparations are given that are believed to cause a diminished version of the very symptoms you are trying to treat. This is much like the vaccination principle in allopathic medicine, and I have no problem with it. It's the second part that loses me, in which the preparation is so heavily diluted that in some cases, there are virtually no molecules left of the original substance. It was explained to me that it works because the energy field around the water molecules has been changed. Oh Read More
Alternative Medicine for Dogs
A comment from a reader inspired this post, about "alternative" medicine for dogs (see the comments for April 15th). In her comment, she expressed great disappointment that I bought into "...wackadoo absolutely scientifically unsupported claptrap." This is not the first time I've been told that my interest in Chinese medicine, acupuncture, chiropracty and natural foods is a kind of a betrayal to my scientific background. And yet, it is exactly my background in science and research that causes me to make the choices that I do for my own health and for that of my dogs. One of the things that one learns when getting a Ph.D. is that "science" is a fluid creature, moving this way and that, depending on the state of our knowledge (and the culture) at the time. You also learn that there is a Read More
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