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Are Some Dog Breeds Grouchier Than Others?

A closer look at one of the most striking findings from the new study out of MIT and Harvard New, state of the art genetic analysis found no significant connection between breed and agonistic thresholds among a big sample of pet dogs. Nor did it find any connection between genetics in general and this particular personality factor, which the researchers defined as “how easily a dog is provoked by frightening, uncomfortable or annoying stimuli.” What the project, called Darwin’s Ark,

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August 22, 2022
Animal Shelters

Behavioral incompatibilities, not behavior problems

“It’s not a problem for the dog; it’s a problem for the human,” is among the first mottos regarding so-called dog “behavior problems” I learned as a novice dog trainer. The famed behaviorist, Dr. Ian Dunbar, would often begin a lecture on behavior modification with some version of this pronouncement. But even though he acknowledged the negative implication of the term, he would continue to use it because it’s such a common language phrase. Experts do this all of the time,

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February 8, 2022
Canine Behavior

Building Social Competence: The real deal in dog safety training

In 2013 the most comprehensive study to date asked whether the dogs (fewer than 1 dog in 2 million)  involved in dog bite-related fatalities (DBRF) had anything in common with one another. The collaboration of a veterinary epidemiologist, a public health expert, an animal behaviorist and dog behavior researchers examined the available evidence regarding every DBRF in the US over a 10 year period, a total of 256. They found 7 situations that were often missing in the lives of

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November 22, 2021
Canine Behavior

A Dog and Her Family Show Us the Importance of Social Competency

“Oh behave,” we often say to our children and dogs alike, when they do stuff that irritates us. But no one, not kids and not puppies either are born knowing how to “behave.” Understanding what’s expected of them, and how to read the signals others give off, and generally how to behave appropriately in social situations, even to recognize the feelings of others all have to be learned. In the language of developmental psychology, all this learning is collected under

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September 4, 2021
Canine Behavior

Words Matter 101: Let’s get rid of the A word

I have a personal litmus test for dog knowledge among humans.  If someone asks, “is that dog aggressive?” I understand immediately that we are starting from zero. Karen Overall, the noted behaviorist, once said that as far as she could tell, the word “aggression” simply meant anything a person didn’t like. She was speaking to an audience of dog professionals. More than 60 years ago, John Paul Scott, one of the earliest and most revered of canine behavior researchers, declared

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August 19, 2021
Canine Behavior

Canine public policies shouldn’t be created from media reports

Dr. Gary Patronek and his colleagues, the authors of a ten-year study of dog bite-related fatalities (DBRF) did something not attempted before or since—they gathered their data from massive accumulations of reports and interviews done by officials, from investigating officers to coroners and pathologists. Previous work on the subject had always been based on collections of reports in the popular media.  One of Patronek et al’s discoveries was that the dog (or dogs) involved usually simply lived on the owner’s

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July 7, 2021
Canine Behavior

The QAnon of Canine Behavior Science

A story on NPR reports that the most popular facebook post on the brief suspension of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine in April was not CNN or NYT or ABC News or Fox News. They were all in the top five, but number one was a conspiracy theorist called An0maly who describes himself as a “news analyst and hip hop artist.” This kind of reliance on wildly unreliable information sources is not limited to high profile public issues. One of the

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June 17, 2021

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