In Part 2 of my interview with my friends and colleagues Dr. Ian Dunbar and Ms. Pia Silvani you'll discover how they define "socialization" and their recommendations about how it should best be accomplished. You'll learn what they see as common mistakes puppy owners – and even trainers make – when trying to "socialize" puppy. Such mistakes can have long lasting effects.
So turn up your speakers and listen in!
If you are a trainer or other pet professional, or even a dedicated dog enthusiast, you can hear the rest of this intriguing interview in our subscription site Behavior Education Network. Find out about ALL the benefits of being a BEN member – by Clicking Here.
At a recent invitational meeting, I had the opportunity to ask my friends and colleagues – Pia and Ian – a VERY important question. Now you can discover what this question was and how they answered it. BOTH may surprise you!
Turn up your speakers and listen in!
Come back and hear Part 2 real soon! OR subscribe to our newsletter using the sign up form on the left, so you'll be the first to know when we add Part 2 and other not-to-be-missed content to our blog!
If you've been following the news, you are likely aware of the tragic attack by a performing whale at Sea World Orlando that killed an experienced trainer. Here's just One Link to a news story about the episode.
Suzanne was interviewed by Mega TV, a Spanish language station in Los Angeles.
Listen to the brief audio of that interview below.
As Suzanne mentioned, it's hard to know why this whale attacked at that particular moment. The whale had been involved in two other incidents resulting in death, although it isn't clear from the news stories exactly what happened in either case and what the whale actually did.
Anytime we can't identify a clear reason or motivation for an animal's behavior, it makes the animal inherently more dangerous because we can't predict how it is going to behave. This goes for dogs and cats as well.
When we work with aggressive animals, and do a risk assessment of the animal, one of the factors we consider is predictability. If we know a dog or cat is going to bite everytime we try to take something away from them, for example, then it is much easier to avoid being bitten. But if an animal bites unpredictably, we don't have any way of avoiding the bite because we don't know when it is likely to happen.
If you would like to learn much more about risk assessment, take our On Demand tele-web-course, Risk Assessment of Aggressive Animals.
If you haven't been to American Humane Association's website lately, you might want to visit THIS PAGE. AHA announces plans to convene a symposium later this year, bringing together top notch experts in the areas of "dog-friendly" training and behavior modification techniques to meet with Cesar Millan to discuss mutual areas of interest.
It's not yet clear what the purpose of this meeting will be, or what it's organizers hope will be a desired outcome.
AHA states they've had significant differences with Mr. Millan about his training techniques – we hope so! But their common interests of promoting spaying and neutering, encouraging owners to exercise their dogs more, and promoting shelter adoptions, don't compensate – in our opinion – for what divides them – his training methods.
But, we'd like to know what you think? Do you think such a symposium is a good idea, a bad idea, or does it depend?
We don't normally embed videos from You Tube on our blog, but we made an exception for this one.
On December 18, 2009, the CVMA and DAVMS offices literally went to the dogs and cats! The
PLEASE SHARE!
Digging can be an annoying canine behavior, when it results in craters in your yard, damaged cables or a re-arrangement of your expensive professional landscaping. But on certain special days, digging can be exactly what we want dogs to do.
Watch the video below where dogs assisted with a ground breaking ceremony and see what the take home lessons are if your dog engages in unwanted digging.
Many behavior problems in pets involve emotional arousal. It is well known that emotions drive behaviors. If you are afraid of insects for example (Suzanne is a real ‘bug-a-phobe’!), you would have a difficult time holding still and being quiet if someone asked you to hold a spider in your hand. This would be virtually impossible for you if your fear is intense enough.
The same is true for our pets. If your dog is uncomfortable around children, asking him to ‘sit’ while a child pets him isn’t going to work well. If one cat is afraid of another, holding one cat while the other approaches so the ‘fraidy cat’ can learn there’s nothing to be afraid of may make things worse.
Fears are not always rational. As a zoologist, Suzanne clearly knows a little house spider won’t hurt her, but this doesn’t help her feel better about holding a spider in her hand. This rational component may not even be present with our pets. The dog may be convinced that the child is indeed going to hurt him, and the cat may believe her survival depends on avoiding the other cat.
Emotions aren’t affected by reinforcement and punishment in the same way voluntary behaviors are. Fears don’t lessen if someone attempts to punish them, nor do they become worse if we attempt to reward them. Dan can’t make Suzanne less afraid of spiders by yelling at her, nor can he make her more afraid by hugging her when she sees a spider. In fact, just the opposite may happen.
Aversive events tend to increase emotional arousal. So Dan yelling at Suzanne if she acts afraid when a spider crawls up her leg may actually increase her fear. Now not only does she have her spider-fear to deal with, but the unpleasantness of being yelled at by her husband as well.
On the other hand, if Dan hugs Suzanne and talks soothingly to her, she may calm down and have less of a reaction to the spider. This may seem opposite to what you’ve probably read in popular literature, which says you should never reassure an animal when he is afraid, as this will only reward the fear.
Can you see from Suzanne’s spider example why this isn’t true? People generally have a difficult time with these concepts until they try them. For example, during the initial stages of a consultation, we often have dogs bark and growl at us. Our reaction is to use the appropriate body postures to make ourselves appear non-threatening (see our Canine Body Posture DVD), and toss treats to the dog. If this were rewarding threatening behavior, causing it to escalate, after 25 years of doing so, we would likely have been severely injured by these dogs by now and made a whole lot of dogs more aggressive! Neither is true.
Instead, just the opposite happens. The dogs calm down, often switch to friendly displays, and want more treats. This is an example of classical counter conditioning at work. This type of conditioning can be a powerful way to change behaviors associated with emotional arousal.
To learn more, take our ON DEMAND course “Using Counter Conditioning and Desensitization Effectively” or purchase the course on DVD.
Some of you may be asking, "What in the heck is a CER?" CER stands for conditioned emotional response. It is simply classical conditioning of a highly emotional response, such as fear or pain to a previously neutral stimulus such as a blue light or sound of wind through the trees. It's why dogs become afraid of wind (a neutral event) if to them it predicts thunder (something they are afraid of).
The term was first used in the learning literature to describe response changes in a procedure called conditioned suppression. A rat was taught to press a bar for food until the behavior was stable, then a tone was sounded followed by a shock. The shock would cause a decrease in the lever pressing for food. After repeated presentations of tone and shock, the tone by itself would suppress the lever pressing, hence conditioned suppression. The delay in lever pressing was caused by fear, a conditioned emotional response.
Remember, classical conditioning is what Pavlov made familiar – because a light, and also a tone, predicted the presentation of food, his dogs began to salivate in response to the light and to the tone, before the food was presented. In CC an animal learns the association between events – one event predicts another.
Conditioned emotional responses don't have to involve fear or pain. You could condition other emotions such as pleasure. Classical counter conditioning often does this in an attempt to change the emotion associated with a stimulus, such as a puppy's fear of a vacuum cleaner. By pairing, many times, the vacuum with something that produces a pleasurable response, such as smearing peanut butter on the vacuum, the vacuum comes to be associated with the pleasure of eating and the fear diminishes.
Our video commentary is about a franchised company that is trying to create a "positive" CER to its brand that, because of the service it provides, typically has an unpleasant emotional reaction for most people. So their strategy is to pair their brand with something more pleasant. Do we think this will work?? Watch the video and see.
Want to know more about how pets and other animals learn?
Get our "How Fido Learns Best" 4CD set AND
the 2 disc set Using Counter Conditioning and Desensitization Effectively to Modify Behavior
WARNING – we explain learning principles in an easy to understand way, and we
GUARANTEE YOU will learn MUCH, but don't expect to listen to these programs as relaxation before bed!
You can read the story in the Chicago Tribune about the man who was killed by his daughter's dogs that were living in the home. At this point, not much is known about the attack and whether all, or just some of the 4 adult dogs and several puppies that resided in the home.
Dr. Hetts was interviewed for the story and said that rather than focusing on the dogs' breed – said by authorities to be "pit bulls" – it's important to consider all the factors that likely contributed to this tragic attack.
At this point, we can only speculate as to what might have happened, but it appears that the daughter was breeding the dogs, suggesting that some or all of the 4 adults were intact (not spayed or neutered). If there was a female in heat, that could certainly have caused an intense degree of arousal and potential social conflict if intact adult males were also present.
The attack on the man could have been a case of redirected aggression, meaning that the man wasn't the initial target for the dogs' aggression, but the behavior was directed onto him. Or, he could have tried to intervene in a fight between the dogs.
Suzanne has been an expert witness in four fatal dog attack cases, and in all but one of the four, it was clear the dog or dogs involved were dangerous prior to the fatal attack. As Suzanne said in the article, a number of factors contribute to creating circumstances that result in fatal attacks. These can include a lack of socialization, abusive treatment, either active or passive encouragment of aggressive and threatening behaviors by the owner, and the dogs not being spayed or neutered. Unfortunately, the media often wants to focus on the dog's breed as the most important factor, which is actually only one of many.
Breeds that have been bred for protection, guarding, or fighting can be expected to have lower thresholds for aggression in certain circumstances. That does not mean they are inherently dangerous. But owners of such breeds need to take extra care to intensely socialize their dogs, train them so that they are well behaved and controlled, spay or neuter them, and not encourage aggressive behavior. When just the opposite happens, a dangerous situation is created – which may have been the case in Chicago.
During a recent presentation at a conference, we were discussing myths surrounding playing tug of war with dogs. We were explaining that tug-of-war is a cooperative game, not a competitive interaction over which individual is going to control the toy. Several people in the audience mentioned they had heard playing tug-of-war is a good way to build a dog’s “confidence.” What exactly does this mean?
One person described that he had been told to play tug to build the dog’s confidence in order to decrease his puppy’s submissive urination when people would try to pet her during greetings. If she was more confident, she would be less likely to submissively urinate. So, rather than having visitors reach out to pet the puppy, the owner instructed them to pick up a toy and play tug with her. Not surprisingly, this was quite effective in stopping the submissive urination.
The technique was effective because it changed the way visitors behaved toward the puppy. Rather than reaching out to pet her, and showing all those behaviors people think are friendly, but are often quite threatening to dogs, (making eye contact, facing them while leaning over them and reaching over their heads to pet them) visitors instead stimulated an alternative behavior – play – that was incompatible with submissive urination.
The dog owner, quite astutely, then commented that the technique worked, but NOT for the reasons he had been told it would work. He was exactly right. The simplest explanation for the effectiveness of the technique is that it removed the events that triggered the behavior (trying to pet the pup) and also engaged the dog in an incompatible behavior (it’s hard to urinate when you’re happily engaged in a game of tug).
Attributing the effectiveness of the procedure to building the dog’s “confidence” is a much more complicated explanation. What does “confidence” mean in terms of dog behavior? Why invoke a more complicated description of personality when a simpler explanation will do?
Using the simplest explanation to explain observations is called parsimony, and is an important, basic principle in the study of animal behavior. Also known as Occum’s Razor, parsimony dictates that it is not only unnecessary, but also inappropriate to choose a complicated explanation to explain observations of behavior, when a simpler one will do.
A number of years ago, Suzanne was a guest on the popular television series “Unsolved Mysteries”. This particular episode was all about animals and why they sometimes displayed “heroic” behavior and saved the lives of their owners or others. One example was a Newfoundland that saved a person from drowning whose boat had overturned in a river. The question put to Suzanne was how did the dog know that the person was drowning and needed saving? Her answer was – he didn’t.
The Newfie’s owner routinely took the dog to the river to swim and play, and the dog was in the habit of retrieving large logs that often floated down the river. In Suzanne’s view, at a distance, the drowning person resembled the large logs the dog had retrieved many, many times. So, the most parsimonious explanation for the dog’s behavior was that he was doing what he had always done – retrieve floating logs.
When we choose the simplest explanation for an animal’s behavior, not only are we more likely to be correct, it’s also more likely that we can take the appropriate steps to modify the animal’s behavior, should that be necessary.