Have you ever gone to a dog training class or taken a private lesson and left with your head swimming?  With so much information, the main messages can sometimes get lost among the more intricate details.  Here are some take-home messages that I use to guide my every-day interaction with my patients as well as…

What message can salmon give us about the importance of being nice? One study shows, that being big and strong and bossing others around isn’t always the best strategy. In some species, the nice guy comes out first. Read this article on Huffington post to find out how.      blogs-different-species-blog-ad Read Dr. Yin’s blog and find out…

Have you ever had a leg injury that was mild enough so that you didn’t limp but serious enough that you had problems during intense sports? For instance, you could run fine in a straight line but favored the leg when making sharp turns or when you had to jump. Luckily as humans we can…

Summer conjures up images of shorts and bikinis, but for dogs, at least those in California, the “in” piece of petwear is protective headgear. Not protection from crashes or spills related to athletic play; protection from those pesky grass awns called foxtails. From afar, these awns look like wheat but close up they look more deadly….

Anyone who rises to the 5:00 a.m. wake-up call of a hungry cat knows that this early morning meow has a clear meaning—Feed Me Now! But can meows alone carry clear messages in different contexts? Nicholas Nicastro and Michael Owren, both formerly in the psychology department at Cornell University, have an interesting answer. While Nicastro…

My suspicions were confirmed the day after Christmas at the Metreon Theater downtown. As the youngest in the family, my job was to wait in line and knowing this, I went prepared—with a scientific article called, “Do dogs respond to play signals given by humans?”  The research, lead by Nicola Rooney at the Anthrozoology Institute…