Tag Archives: study

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 →

12/28/10

Trio of Dogs Study

ResearchBlogging.orgI have just read a very interesting article by Michael Fox, Alan Beck and E. Beckman entitled “Behaviour and ecology of a small group of urban dogs” (see full details at end of this post). This article certainly stirred some thoughts in me.

Basically, this is a study of a trio of feral dogs (two males and a female) living in vacant, derelict buildings in St Louis City, Missouri, in 1973. These dogs were studied from March 1973 until February 1974, for 90 hours over this period of time.

Obviously somewhat dated, but nonetheless an interesting investigation of how unowned dogs fend for themselves in an urban setting. (The authors do make the distinction between free ranging dogs, who have owners who allow them to range, and feral dogs, who are on their own.)

It’s an interesting enough piece of work all around, but the areas I found of particular interest is: the marking behaviour of the dogs, the interactions of the dogs with others of their species, and the psuedo-hunting behaviour the dogs engaged in. I will detail each of these below. Continue reading →