What a BOOMING month for dogs and science October was! Weve captured the links to all the latest blogs, research and news that caught out attention throughout Dog-tober.
Thanks to Storify (click here if the you cant see the collection of links below) you can make sure you didnt miss out too. Further reading: Bradshaw J.W.S. & Nicola J. Rooney (2014). Why do adult dogs ‘play’?, Behavioural Processes, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2014.09.023
Bozkurt A., Barbara Sherman, Rita Brugarolas, Sean Mealin, John Majikes, Pu Yang & Robert Loftin (2014). Towards Cyber-Enhanced Working Dogs for Search and Rescue, IEEE Intelligent Systems, 1-1. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/mis.2014.77
"On Sunday I sat outside in the sun, stroking Elkes so-soft ears, while my husband patted her long, sleek back, and we farewelled our first girl. We learned on Friday that her liver and spleen were full of cancer. We are so grateful to have shared 12.5yrs with her and will miss her dearly." is what my Facebook status update said. But lets start at the beginning...
Little Elke-Moo and her cow hips, at RSPCA
I met Elke (pronounced Ell-kee) when I was in my third week of employment in the RSPCA shelter. What a sucker I was! She was seized as part of a cruelty case from a property where an elderly man with dementia had over forty dogs. Because of the dementia, the dogs weren’t receiving proper care and he sometimes fed them chicken pellets. Of her litter, Elke was the only survivor. She looked like a 5 week old puppy but she was actually 12 weeks old.
She was always small. Our ‘bonsai pointer’, we called her. We joked that she was little, but could lay a good egg. My boyfriend at the time and I had been speaking about getting a dog, and pointers had come up as a breed we were interested in – he wanted a dog to run with him. After three weeks of rehabilitation at RSPCA, she came home with me. I was 23 years old. Since then, she has been a fixture in the landscape of our lives - through house moves, our engagement and marriage, the death of my father, the arrival of our daughter, the comings and goings of oh-so-many other dogs (occupational hazard!).
Elke and my daughter - a fantastic introduction to dogs
Elke was energetic, excitable and hilarious. She wasnt perfect, but neither were we. We were a perfect match. She realised, as a young dog, that she could redirect attention to herself if visitors were over, by trawling our dirty clothes basket for recent underwear and then parading it through the lounge room for everyone to see.
Post-beach snooze with our other dog, Caleb
She didn’t like thunderstorms or fireworks. She loved running off lead at the park, the beach or through the bush and she adored retrieving. She would regularly throw herself into water without stopping to check for a way out. One time I had to walk along a river back for about 500m while she swam and we looked for a place where she could scramble up the riverbank to get out again! We took Elke to obedience training and she taught us so much. Elke was also more than our pet. She helped as a friendly adult dog at puppy preschool classes, she posed as a jaunty model as Australia legislated for the end of tail docking, she tried to distract trainee guide dogs and she visited nursing homes as a certified visiting therapy dog. They were all things we did together, my spotty dog and I.
Elke loved playing swim-retrieve in the water
She and our other dog Caleb were very close. They had a silly play ritual they indulged in every day. Twice a day. A close-quarters mouthing and growling game that ended in howling calamity. It was sometimes annoying (working from home, it wasn’t always compatible with work-related phone calls!), but always made me smile. But now our house is very quiet.
We all loved time at the beach
We didn’t know Elke was sick until a week before she was euthanased. We took her to the vet, her temperature was up, a blood sample was taken, antibiotics were commenced. We didn’t know just how sick she was until two days before. What we did know, was that she was getting older, slowing down, not hearing the thunderstorms any more – and we knew she wouldn’t live forever. But that day always seems - in the future.
Instant couch-rights
When the vet rang me on Friday (the 13th) to advise that the ultrasound showed Elke’s liver and spleen were full of cancer, I was interstate at a conference aiming to eliminate the euthanasia of healthy and treatable pets in Australia. I was told that there were no options. Elke was comfortable, but at risk of bleeding internally and needed to be kept quiet with minimal activity. Euthanasia was not required immediately, but certainly the recommended course of action to avoid a slow and painful death by haemorrhage. I made the appointment for the day after I was due home and cried in my hotel room until there were no tissues left.
Sunday morning was a beautiful morning in Melbourne. The sun was out. I sat with Elke and my just-turned-3-year-old daughter in our garden. We talked about Elke being sick and that she was going to die. She asked hard questions. I did my best to answer them. We weren’t able to play retrieve, but passed Elke little sticks and she crunched them in her teeth. I took some last photos of the two of them – my girls – who have enjoyed a calm and positive relationship. Then Pete and I took Elke to the vet. She was given a mild sedative and we walked outside into the vet clinic’s garden (she never really liked veterinary consult’ rooms). We placed her bed on the grass in the sun, while she walked and sniffed. As the sedation took effect, I helped her settle onto her bed and she relaxed, dozing in the sun. Pete gently stroked her back. I had her relaxed head cushioned in my lap, savouring the sensation of her silky soft ears against my fingertips, one last time. She didn’t even notice the needle that entered the vein in her leg with the overdose of anaesthetic. It really was the perfect euthanasia.
Elke was doing selfies pre-Facebook - circa 2003
Now Elke is gone, and we’re adjusting to this changed landscape of our lives.
Despite all the dogs that have lived in our home, for days or for years, Elke is the first dog that we have owned from puppyhood through to old age. In some ways, this is helping me cope with her death. With other dogs I think I’ve felt an element of anger that we had met too late for them to live their best life, or been robbed of time together through unexpected illness taking them too soon. But today, I’m trying to take comfort in the fact that Elke lived a fabulous and full life with us; her passing was as peaceful and stress free as any of us could hope for. I’m so grateful that our daughter had Elke to share her infancy with.
It still hurts. In ways that bubble up unexpectedly. And I know that’s OK. Grief is messy. It’s individual and it takes as long as it takes. Time plays a critical role and will not be rushed.
Spooning in 2003.
Still besties in 2013.
Research over the past 25 years has shown us that grieving for a pet follows the same reactions and involves the same emotional responses as dealing with a human loss. People who have lost a pet commonly experience intense feelings such as sadness, anger, anxiety, disbelief, depression, panic, relief or even numbness. The act of consenting to euthanasia has been found to be particularly disturbing for some owners, who feel they have betrayed a trust by choosing death over life. Of course, grief responses to death of companion animals is linked to the strength of attachment we have with them, but we should not trivialise, nor brush aside our response to the death of our pets.
Animals are important to us and the grief we experience when they die is real. We should be gentle to ourselves.
Acknowledging this and permitting ourselves to react (however we need to) is important. Letting our support networks (friends, family, colleagues) know how we feel and letting them help us in return is also important. If time isn’t helping, or you lack a support network, seek further help, from your doctor or a professional counsellor. The Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement has helpful information about grief here. The number of friends who have sent me kind messages, called to see how were doing this week or even driven over just to give me a hug has shown me that a) Elke was a dog whose reach was long, and that b) I have amazing friends and family!
And so, my friend, I’m off to give Caleb a big hug. Because amongst all the other sad (for Elke, for my daughter, for me) I’m sad that he may never get to do this again:
Mia
Do You Believe in Dog? will place further helpful resources about dealing with the grief associated with pet loss online soon.
My submitted proof that the sun did shine out of...
Further reading: Weisman A.D. (1990). Bereavement and Companion Animals, OMEGA--Journal of Death and Dying, 22 (4) 241-248. DOI: 10.2190/C54Y-UGMH-QGR4-CWTL Archer J. & Winchester G. (1994). Bereavement following death of a pet, British Journal of Psychology, 85 (2) 259-271. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1994.tb02522.x Podrazik D., Shackford S., Becker L. & Heckert T. (2000). The Death of a Pet: Implications for Loss and Bereavement Across the Lifespan, Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss, 5 (4) 361-395. DOI: 10.1080/10811440008407852 Smith A. (2012). Pet Loss and Human Emotion: Whats New?, Death Studies, 36 (3) 292-297. DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2011.590443 Field N., Orsini L., Gavish R. & Packman W. (2009). Role of Attachment in Response to Pet Loss, Death Studies, 33 (4) 334-355. DOI: 10.1080/07481180802705783 Read More..
Join us for another guest post, this time from Claudia Fugazza of the Family Dog Project in Budapest. Claudias here to discuss her recent publication in Applied Animal Behaviour Science on the efficiency of new methods in dog training.
Hi Mia and Julie,
Formal training methods used until now rely mainly on the well-known rules of individual associative learning. These methods work perfectly well for a very wide range of animals — pigeons, rats, dogs and even crabs — and human and non-human animals can learn by ‘click and treat,’ as noted in the popular training book by Karen Pryor.
However, recent research has found substantial evidence that dogs could be predisposed to acquire information socially via the ‘Do as I do’ method. Do as I Do is a relatively new training method for people to use, based on dogs’ social cognitive skills, particularly on their imitative ability.
With this training technique, dogs learn new behaviors by observing and copying their handler. The dog is a copycat. This method relies on social learning, and it was recently introduced in the applied field of dog training.
As this method has started spreading in the dog training world, we felt that its efficiency and efficacy needed scientific testing. We were also wanting to know whether this method would be more or less efficient than other current training methods in training for particular behaviors.
We expected that dogs would more easily copy object-related actions from a human demonstrator so we tested dogs’ efficiency in this kind of tasks. To do this, I travelled across Italy and the UK with my video-cameras as well as a heavy Ikea cabinet filled with objects (you can imagine the weird looks I got from security personal at checkpoints!). I used these objects to test dogs learning to open or close drawers and lockers, pick up items from it etc. Since training methods can be affected by the skills of the trainer, only experienced dog-owners pairs who achieved a certificate either for the ‘Do as I do’ method or for shaping / clicker training were included in the study. Each pair was tested using ‘his’ method for teaching three different object-related actions in three testing sessions.
We expected that the ‘Do as I do’ method would prove more efficient for teaching complex tasks, compared to the shaping method that relies on individual learning. This expectation comes from what we know in humans: we tend to rely more on social learning when required to learn something difficult.
Our research found that the ‘Do as I do’ method proved more efficient for teaching dogs complex tasks, like close a drawer, open a locker and pick up an item that was inside (i.e., the time needed by the owner to obtain the first correct performance of the predetermined action was shorter with the ‘Do as I do’ method compared to shaping). We did not find a significant difference in the efficiency of the methods for teaching dogs simple tasks like knocking over a bottle or ringing a bell.
Now that we know a bit more on how to efficiently teach complex object-related actions, we are curious to know what happens when we want to teach different kind of complex actions, like body movements. We also want to know whether introducing social learning in dog training could have an effect on learning cues for trained action.
We are aware that learning rates can be influenced by many factors, and we acknowledge that this study is just a very first step towards a more scientific approach to training paradigms. However we believe that this kind of information can be very important for the practitioners working in the applied field of dog training. We hope that the readers will not misinterpret the results and will not extend them to different actions and situations that were not tested.
Furthermore we would like to emphasize that, despite being efficient for training some kinds of actions, the ‘Do as I do’ method does not replace the methods based on individual learning (for example think of how many actions are not imitable at all if the demonstrator is a human and the learner is a dog!). Instead ‘Do as I do’ is a useful (and fun!) addition to existing training paradigms. Experienced dog trainers may find effective ways to mix the different training techniques in order to obtain the best results with each dog.
Claudia Fugazza Do as I Do Book and DVD http://www.apprendimentosociale.it/en/claudia-fugazza/ Family Dog Project Reference Fugazza C. & Miklósi Á. (2014). Should old dog trainers learn new tricks? The efficiency of the Do as I do method and shaping/clicker training method to train dogs, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 153 53-61. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2014.01.009
First of all, I LOVE your blog! After meeting at SPARCS this past summer (summer for us in North America.. I take it summer is just beginning in Australia!), I’ve followed it closely. You do amazing things for the promotion of canine science. Serious love. A bit of background for the readers: I’m currently doing my PhD at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Simon Gadbois. Dr. Gadbois has an amazing amount of knowledge and experience in the science of sniffing (just check out Gadbois & Reeve, 2014 link below!).
He’s trained sniffer dogs for the conservation of ribbon snakes and wood turtles, to track coyotes, and to detect invasive pests in lumber. He and I have taken on a different type of project and are studying the intricacies of biomedical detection dogs, specifically, the very interesting phenomenon of Diabetic Alert Dogs.
Cat Reeve at #SPARCS2014 where she won the Best Emerging Researcher prize
I say interesting because there’s anecdotal evidence suggesting that some dogs alert their owners to hypoglycemic events (low blood sugar). In 2008, Deborah Wells published a series of case studies where dogs were reported as signalling (barking, licking, pawing etc. the individual) while their owners were awake, while they were sleeping, and even when their owners were in a different room with the door closed! And this is with no previous training! Isn’t this fantastic! Severe hypoglycemic events can be extremely dangerous for individuals with diabetes. If not treated, they can lead to seizures, comas, and even death. The fact that dogs may be able to alert an individual before a serious hypoglycemic event means less worry about hypoglycaemia unawareness, and blood sugar dropping over night when individuals are unconscious.
Given that dogs are signalling through closed doors, it is assumed that the dogs smell something that alerts them to a change in the physiology of their owner (as opposed to behavioural cues, as is believed to be the case with seizure alert dogs). There are many companies that have taken advantage of this supposed ability, and have trained Diabetic Alert Dogs (DADs) to sell to individuals with diabetes. In my own searches, I have found no company that publicly provides information as to how they train their dogs. However, according to recent studies (see Gonder-Frederick et al., 2013 and Rooney et al., 2011 below) these trained DADs dogs contribute greatly to the families of individuals’ with diabetes; they signal consistently and, consequently, significantly reduce the number of hypoglycemic events an individual experiences. Now, if it is in fact an olfactory cue that dogs use to identify a drop in blood sugar in their owners, one would expect that if you presented one of these trained DADs with the “scent” of hypoglycemia without the individual present (just like having the owner with diabetes on the other side of a door), the dog would still signal. Dehlinger and colleagues recently tested three DADs in a lab setting, presenting the dogs with human biological samples that were obtained identically to the way the samples used to train the dogs were obtained. In this study, none of the three dogs could pick out a hypoglycemic sample from a normoglycemic sample! DARN! So what is it that these dogs smell? How is it that some DADs are accurate at signalling hypoglycaemia but evidently cannot signal in the lab? Enter ME! This is what I’m trying to figure out! One possibility is that, at least in the study outlined above, the use of sweat samples was misguided. Maybe the volatiles are more strongly present in an individual’s breath. I am currently in the process of testing whether there is one channel more likely than others to expel the volatiles needed to detect a change in blood sugar, i.e. breath, sweat, or saliva. So far we’ve found that, after being trained to detect extremely low saliency scents, our dogs can detect and discriminate between human breath samples with incredible ease and accuracy (see the video of Koda discriminating between breath samples).
Little Koda discriminating between breath samples. The jar that has the check mark on it is the target sample. The jar with the x+ is a different breath sample. When Koda first enters the room, he smells a jar that is the “sample” (it matches the target sample)... This is the smell we want him to find amongst the three jars that are closer to the camera. He chooses the right one!
Preliminary tests with patient samples suggest that our dogs can also tell the difference between breath samples taken from the same individual when their blood sugar was low, when it was normal, and when it was high (unpublished). Also, it’s possible that in the Dehlinger et al. (2013) study, the sample collection procedure was simply not sufficient enough to contain the volatiles produced during a hypoglycemic event. With the help of a fantastic chemist at Dalhousie (Dr. Peter Wentzell), we have perfected a procedure that coats cotton balls in silicone oil. This is believed to help contain the volatiles through the *magic of chemistry. *may actually be science, not magic - check with the chemists Another potential is that these DADs are simply responding to a general stress response in the body. It’s possible that DADs (and untrained dogs who signal to their owners) are picking up on the physiological change associated with stress (changes in cortisol, adrenaline etc.). Kind of how people say animals can smell when you’re scared. If this is truly what’s happening, you would expect to see DADs giving a lot of false alarms. And in fact, personal communication with friends of friends who own DADs tell me that their DADs alert to not only hypoglycemic events, but to asthma attacks, anxiety attacks, etc. If you read carefully, few studies ask owners of DADs if their dog gives a lot of false alarm signals (dog signals to their owner and after the owner checks their blood sugar, they discover that they are not low). Isn’t this fascinating? The dogs I work with are incredible (shout out to the amazing owners that let me work with their dogs every week), and have incredible work ethic and sniffers.
Our dogs are extremely motivated to work (because we make it super fun!). This is Nutella on her “break”. She doesn’t want a break. She wants to keep working! She’s whining and pawing at the door of the work room.
With the assistance of these amazing dogs, hopefully Dr. Gadbois and myself will be able to shed light on how exactly DADs do their job in the near future - Ill let you know how we go!
Cat Reeve PhD Candidate Dalhousie University CANADA
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We are thrilled to announce that Doggone Safe Eastern Canada Coordinator Tonji Stewart was the co-grand prize winner of the Canis Film Festival. The award was presented at Clicker Expo in Chicago on the weekend. This is an international video contest for clicker trainers and the videos must demonstrate how to teach something using clicker training. The videos are judged on entertainment and teaching value and the winners must demonstrate excellence in the application of clicker training principles in training.
We are very proud of Tonjis accomplishment and her efforts to promote force free training methods that are safe for kids and dogs.
Click here to listen to an interview with Tonji on CBC radio
I’m not exactly sure what that means, as we don’t celebrate it in Australia, but I hope you had a great time with your family and friends all the same!
Thanks for all those fantastic resources you included in your last blog post. It was alsogreat to see some extras posted by readers in the comments section.
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Last time I looked at ‘The Good’ of some the science surrounding children and dogs. This post, it’s time to cover some of the ‘The Bad’.
What can possibly be bad about children and dogs?Well, dogs don’t live as long as us, for one.
When dogs die
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Having established last time that dogs can benefit kids’ confidence, self-belief, trust, respect and heaps of other positive attitudes and behaviours, I was left wondering how losing a pet dog impacts children. Loss of a companion animal can be a devastating event for people of any age.
Humans don’t all experience grief equally.
Our understanding of deathis linked to our developmental state, but young children can still feel pain at the loss of a family dog. For many children, the death of a pet dog will be their first experience with this kind of loss and grief. Pet dogs can be almost-constant companions for children, and have been assigned a role in reflected appraisal similar to that of a best friend.
Psychologists encourage parents/guardians to explain death to kids sensitively and with honesty. Adults should answer questions simply, using clear and accurate information and avoid the desire to ‘protect’ children from death by hiding the truth of a pet’s illness or euthanasia. This is because children with active imaginations may create scenarios about the death that are far worse than reality.
Adults should allow children to express their grief (through verbal, artistic or written expression; reading stories about the death of pets, etc.), acknowledging the importance of the relationship lost (rather than trivializing the death or running to buy a new puppy) and helping children to understand that grief is a normal and natural emotion that helps us cope with death.
Sometimes bad can be good
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Some psychologists believe that such trauma (with a successful associated recovery) can strengthen our capacity to deal with future stress and adversity. This is referred to as psychological resilience and is considered a desirable and healthy process as it enables a person, or in this case a child, to develop coping strategies and support networks (friends, adults, family, etc.) that will serve them in difficult times later in life.
Your dog is a zoo-
Zoo noses? (source)
Its true (when youre using zo/zoo- as a prefix to indicate animals are involved). And its about noses. Not noses-noses, that would be silly. Im talking about Zoonoses. As in diseases that can transfer from animals to people. As in from a dog to a child. Theyre not pretty.
Research has shown that people can be generally uninformed about some of the most common zoonotic diseases (e.g. common roundworm eggs readily transfer between dogs and people; the worm larvae can decide to live in the back of childrens eyes which can lead to blindness - people should know that!)
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I suggest that if any of your dog-owning friends with children arent aware of the risks of zoonotic diseases, they run an online search for dogs zoonosis [insert country of residence] so they can read up on what parasite control and other measures can be used in their neck of the globe to reduce the risk of zoonoses.
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Maintaining good child and dog health and hygiene should be a no-brainer. Did you know dogs can catch things from kids too? Thats called reverse zoonosis. And to think sharing is something I normally praise my toddler for!
I hope you’ll grit your teeth and stick with me for my third post about the science surrounding children and dogs. You’ve seen The Good and now The Bad – next time, Im going to bring out The Ugly. Ill also touch on what science has to say about our childhood experience with dogs influencing us as adults. What do you reckon your childhood experiences with Arf contributed to your adult attitudes?
Now that we know a bit more on how to efficiently teach complex object-related actions, we are curious to know what happens when we want to teach different kind of complex actions, like body movements. We also want to know whether introducing social learning in dog training could have an effect on learning cues for trained action. 
