Tag Archives: academic

04/3/11

McGreevy’s Thoughts on Dog Science

This post is part of the McGreevy seminar series. Click here for the index.

 

Paul McGreevy spoke a lot about research, and basically reaffirmed my points in my post Paucity in Dog Science.  McGreevy believes that ‘the times are turning’ and dogs are beginning to be a legitimate research topic. There is a lot to be learnt about dogs.

In my post ‘Paucity in Dog Science’, I identified three reasons that dogs are rarely scientifically studied.  Firstly, expense. Secondly, that dogs do not have an official academic field of study. And finally, because humans are self centred and only interested in themselves.

Paul McGreevy identified different issues hindering the research of dogs. Continue reading →

01/9/11

Paucity in Dog Science

I’ve always loved the quote, “If you put two dog trainers in a room, the only thing they will agree upon is that the third dog trainer is wrong.” Any issue in the dog world is like this: Vaccinations, feeding dogs, desexing, dog-dog interactions… Anything that involves dogs almost undoubtedly also involves some conflicting ideas.

In my opinion, these conflicts are caused by the paucity in scientific literature on dogs. There is a lot of material out there about dogs, but not a lot of it has been studied scientifically. If dogs were studied in this way, maybe we would have less conflict and more solid answers on the right things to be doing with our animals.

So why aren’t we researching dogs? Continue reading →