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When you do the math, behavior evaluations flunk

Article authors demonstrate why when a shelter dog tests positive for dangerous behavior, it is much more likely that the test has failed the dog, rather than the dog having failed the test.

The Telephone, Science, and Dogs

The Telephone, Science, and Dogs

In the press and in the academic literature, a complex version of Telephone is played every day. If not diligently and knowledgeably researched, reports in the press and the scientific literature may distort messages contained in the underlying reports they are citing.

Are you happy? Disgusted? Your dog can tell the difference

Once again researchers at the Family Dog Project in Hungary have confirmed an ability that dog lovers have long suspected in our canine companions. In an ingenious series of experiments the Eötvös Loránd University ethologists demonstrated that dogs can discriminate between human expressions of happiness, disgust, and simply blank indifference. [1] They built on earlier studies […]

Incoherent definitions confound attempts to label dogs as “pit bulls”

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Most animal shelters continue to assign breed descriptors to dogs whose origin they do not know[1], even though current university research has shown that breed identification based on visual inspection correlates poorly with DNA breed signature, and that observers will disagree with each other when examining the same dog. These difficulties are only compounded when […]

No single factor explains barking, growling, lunging and biting behavior in dogs.

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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, […]