No single factor explains barking, growling, lunging and biting behavior in dogs.
Dr. Rachel Casey from Bristol University in the UK, and colleagues, recently attempted to estimate the number of dogs barking, lunging, growling or biting – the behaviors they grouped together under the term, aggression[1] — and to see if they could identify decisive causes of such behavior. Of more than 14,000 UK dog owners surveyed, […]
“Police and Dog Encounters” Training Videos Released.
National Canine Research Council (NCRC) is happy to announce the release of “Police and Dog Encounters”, the law enforcement training series developed in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, NCRC, and Safe Humane Chicago. The training series was developed to help officers keep themselves, their communities, and the […]
Neuroscience May Confirm What Many Dog Lovers Already Know
Dog owners regularly attribute emotions such as love and loyalty to their pets, and may be just as regularly dismissed for doing so. The Dog Project, being conducted by Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta, has detected canine brain activity suggesting that dog owners may have the last laugh. Dr. Berns […]
Assumptions about future behavior of shelter dogs seen as food aggressive are unfounded.
Animal shelters may conduct what they describe as behavioral evaluations of the dogs they receive, in order to discover what they presume will be problem behaviors when the dogs are adopted into new homes. Among the behaviors that evaluations are designed to detect are those labeled “food aggression.” The behaviors described by that term include […]
Of Mice and Dogs: Their Personalities May Be Up To Us
Most of us easily acknowledge the likelihood that specific behaviors can be influenced by learning, in ourselves and in other species, including the one closest to us, our companion dogs. We can learn to tie our shoes, and our dogs can learn to walk next to us. We can even learn rules of etiquette and […]
Animal professionals shown to disagree with each other when assigning breed(s) to dogs of unknown parentage.
Summary A survey of more than 900 people in dog-related professions and services showed that they frequently disagreed with each other when making visual breed identifications of the same dog, and that their opinions may or may not have correlated with DNA breed analysis. More than 70% of the study participants reported that now, or […]
Study underscores that we can only learn what dogs are capable of from capable dogs.
The human community has changed dramatically in the modern era. Both dogs and people are continually adjusting to new phenomena (trains, cars, streets teeming with other people and other dogs, to name a few) and new expectations that arise from our living in closer proximity to each other. It’s challenging enough for people. How do […]
How long before we discard visual breed identification? A new survey confirms that even dog experts can’t tell just by looking.
In the 1960’s, John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller showed that mixed breed dogs may bear little or no resemblance to their purebred ancestors.[i] In 2009, Dr. Victoria Voith and colleagues from Western University published a short report indicating a low agreement between the identification of breeds of dogs by adoption agencies and DNA […]
Study shows owners and non-owners recognize animal emotions
“‘Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, ‘Doesn’t this guy have a dog?”’ – Frans De Waal, quoted in The New York Times June 26, 2001 Charles Darwin argued that emotions evolved in both humans and animals; and scientists who have studied […]
Dogs’ personalities more reflective of their relationships with people than of their breed
Janis Bradley examines a recent study published in Applied Animal Behavior Science.