It’s fun to take your pooch to the park for off-leash play and dogs can look like they are having fun, but are they always learning the right things? One owner of a Bulldog knows all to well that the answer is no. “Max took a while to warm up to new people and dogs,” she says. “Then we left him with the breeder where he got to run around with other Bulldogs in what the breeder said was normal rough bulldog play. When we got him back he was suddenly barking and lunging people he would have just stayed

Every year, the UC Davis Animal Science Department raises and sells yearling horses at their annual auction. While most owners would be happy if their yearlings could lead nicely on halter and load calmly into a trailer, in the Spring of 2000, when I was teaching the behavior courses in the Animal Science Department, I helped the students in charge of the yearlings aim higher. Using a combination of clicker training and natural horsemanship, we trained a number of handy behaviors. One of the first things we taught was lateral and vertical bending. We taught the behaviors using two different

This is the overall approach to the fearful or reactive dog in a nutshell. It’s all about addressing the dog’s overall ability to look to you for guidance, and your ability to be aware of his emotional state and to reward desired behaviors and remove rewards for unwanted behaviors.

Traditionally, dog classes focus on basic exercises like training dogs to sit, lie down, stand, come, and heel on command. While these may be important tasks for dogs to learn, dog training can and should include a more global approach. For instance, the dog may know how to sit or to walk next to their owner in class, but if they haven’t learned to actually focus on their owner, they won’t be able to perform these behaviors in the presence of every-day distractions. Furthermore, positive reinforcement classes often give adequate rewards for desired behavior, but without also training the dog

In this paper, the Brelands described a number of cases with different species where strong species-specific behaviors interfered with the learning process and caused delays in performance and delays in reinforcements. They called this phenomenon instinctive drift to describe the idea that animals have instinctive, species typical behaviors.

As an animal behaviorist, science and animal behavior are always on my mind; which is why I came up with the idea for this blog in the middle of my deep-water running workout yesterday. I was listening to a podcast of NPR’s Fresh Air, while speeding along at an incredibly slow pace when an interesting question was posed by the guest, neurologist David Linden, author of The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good. Why are Cigarettes More Addicting Than Heroin? He asked, “Why is it that 80% percent