Thank you. Thanks, Antony, and, and thank you everybody for staying up late, in the UK for this session. And I hope you've had a great day on, on the virtual congress.
So we're gonna be talking, in my session on, dogs biting, and, and the question in the title, do dogs bite without warning, or should we see it coming? And certainly, the first question then is, is it true? Do canine bites come without warning?
Certainly, owners report this. They often come and tell us that their dog bite incident has happened out of the blue. They're often really shocked by the behaviour, and they often also will tell us that the dog is fine with visitors or with children at other times.
And that this behaviour really took them by surprise. And yes, if you look at this photograph, those of you who are more familiar, perhaps with looking at images for assessing emotional health in our in our dogs, we'll see the ears back on the head, the licking of the face through appeasement, which is a sign of concern. And the baby, therefore being a a a source of worry for this dog, and yet that may well have been misinterpreted, and this is the sort of image that people often think means that the dog is fine.
Veterinary practises, though, also find themselves sometimes taken aback when a canine patient bites. So, if these dog bites really do happen without warning, we've got a bit of a problem because it'll mean that prevention strategies can't really be successful. And it means that we're going to be left with dog bites continuing to take people by surprise.
So, thankfully, We need to look at ways in which they can be predicted, and indeed they can, and hopefully by the end of this session, you'll have a better understanding of how. So if there are ways in which we can predict, the most important outcome of that is that dog bite prevention is a possibility, and this is something that is incredibly important. We need to be working on dog bite prevention, and in order that we have to understand how these behaviours can be predicted.
So, the good news is that actually, in most of those situations where a dog bites, there has either been warning signs, signs that the owner and the people interacting with the dog didn't notice, but which clearly showed that something could go wrong. Or there's a. Really, which explains the lack of those warning signals.
And even in those situations, the warning signals probably are still there, but maybe more subtle as a result of previous learning. Usually previous learning through punishment is illustrated in the picture here with the boxer. That if they are punished for showing the warning signs, for example, for growling, then yes, it may be more likely that the bite appears to happen out of the blue.
But as with the boxer on the previous slide and the golden retriever down in the bottom picture, there are warning signs. So, education is crucial, both in our profession and in our dog owning public, because we need to be able to improve the detection of those warning signs. So if we look here at these pictures, we see on the left-hand side, and similar one to the boxer with the ears back in this beagle, the, lipping of licking of the lips, the showing of high emotional arousal.
And you can see the happy child, but the unhappy dog. In the middle picture, we have the dog lying on his bed, often perceived by people to be a good dog, a calm dog. Isn't he relaxed in the presence of our visitors?
But if you look closely at his face again, you can see the ears held back, and you can also see the whites of the eyes as he's following the unfamiliar person in the room with his eyes, who gets in a state of inbition and taking in information about this potentially difficult situation. And again, with the dog on the right with his food bowl, that wary eye and ears back posture. So, if we can start to increase detection of these warning signals, we can increase the potential to have a good dog bite prevention initiative, both locally, and that's important, but also on a global scale.
And it's important at a conference such as this, which is a global conference. To emphasise that we have the same issue. We live with companion animals, and there may be cultural differences to some extent, but the animals are still mammals.
They still have the same emotional systems and therefore they have the same, and they also have the same species specific body language. So, let's think for a minute about where and when dogs bite. Aggressive behaviour, it's sometimes called, and, and people who've heard me speak before will know that I really dislike the term aggression or aggressive because it's so poorly defined.
It's really very subjective according to the perception of the person, whether a behaviour is described as being aggressive or not. And therefore, as you'll see as we go through this presentation, I use slightly different terminology, but. If we want to use that word, where, how is it defined?
How can we report it? Well, in behavioural medicine, there's a lot of debate about how to classify what I would term repulsive behaviour or confrontational behaviour. And contextual labelling of behaviour is quite common, but we also have a possibility of, of labelling in other ways.
Let's look at contextual labelling for a minute. So examples would be territorial aggression. So the territorial part is the context and tells you that this behaviour is happening in association with a territory.
Territory, of course, just being a space where your resources are. Another example would be possessive aggression. Again, possessive relates to the context, relates to the fact that there is something, an object, or something that the animal has hold of.
And also food related aggression. Again, it's a contextual label. But context of course is important.
Discussing contextual labelling is, is useful, it will increase owner awareness, particularly of where and when the aggressive responses are likely to be seen. So it can help them to avoid those contacts. So, for example, if the dog is aggressive in the, in the kitchen when there's food or in a whelping pen, if she's a bitch with puppies or in the garden when the dog's got a toy, the hallway when the postman calls, there are certain contexts that potentially the owner can be more aware of, and therefore can be, more circumspect in in avoiding.
So in the short term, we can manage the behaviour. If we take an example then of a dog that is aggressive in inverted commas, confrontational over food, then what can the owner do? Well, certainly, they can avoid placing the dog in situations where human food is present.
And they also can make sure that the dog's left alone to eat its daily food ration without being disturbed. Now, we're not talking there, obviously, about ways in which you can alter the behaviour in the long term, but in terms of safety, by using this contextual label, we've opened the door to some useful management techniques which can decrease risk. The next thing we could do in terms of, of classifying is to think about who the dog bites.
So can an aggression is sometimes classified in terms of the so-called victim? For example, we talk about dog to dog aggression, and then that's sometimes subdivided into things like bitch to bitch or into male or aggression to familiar or unfamiliar dogs. And we do the same with aggression to humans, subcategorizing that into owner or visitor or stranger directed aggression.
Again, this is a potentially helpful form of labelling the behaviour in terms of management, because by labelling, with this, who does the dog bite, we can start again to think about limiting the dog's interaction with potential targets. So, for example, limiting their interaction with other dogs, making sure they're not coming into contact with children, that they're not at the front door when delivery people or visitors are arriving. And also we can think about limiting their interaction with certain potential targets in the form of familiar adults.
So, again, in the same way as the context, the who or the so-called victim labelling can help us in our management. But this question, why do dogs bite is really the most important of the so-called W questions. Because if we look at the why the dogs bite, then we can start to really get in place a dog bite prevention programme, rather than just a management strategy.
So the first thing we need to do is understand potential motivation. So where, when and with whom is good information in terms of management, it's good information in terms of increasing awareness, but why is crucial for long-term modification. So, in order to predict the behaviour, if you like to see it coming, going back to the title of the talk, it's this why question which is the most important.
So is prediction possible? Well, let's look at what behaviour is. So behaviour can be thought of as an outward expression of the animal's underlying emotional motivation, what the animal is minded to do through its emotional drives.
It's strongly influenced, of course, by learning. So, yes, there's an emotional drive, but the learning that the animal has has been subjected to because of the outcome or the consequence of their behavioural responses will also be important. So we need to understand the individual animal.
We can't think about prediction on a global scale for every single dog. We can think about some general guidelines for all dogs, and then we must think about that individual. So when history is available, it's gonna be much easier to predict what that dog will do.
If we know about that dog, if we know where it came from, where it was born, what experience it's, it has had, that's gonna make it much easier for us to predict how it's likely to behave in different situations. But in some situations, the task of predicting behavioural outcome is made more difficult, for example, because the dog is new to the family, or the dog has been obtained from rescue and there is no available history, or maybe this is a new patient within the veterinary practise. So when we have no or little history, our ability to predict on the basis of the individual becomes difficult.
So how do we identify emotional state? Because in order to move forward thinking about prediction in a context when we're with an individual who perhaps we don't know much about, we need to think about these specific emotional systems and what is being triggered in that moment. And it's Jack Pans who identified the different emotional systems related to different potential behavioural responses.
And I'm just gonna run through those that are relevant in this context. So if we look at the desire seeking system, this is a positive general purpose system, which motivates animals to move to places where they can find resources. So places where they can find food and shelter, things that are important for their survival.
And so we have an example here of a behaviour driven by the desire seeking system, which has then been harnessed and honed through a process of learning. So it's, we need to remember that the emotional systems are the basic drive and that learning then modifies those behavioural responses that come from it. The fear anxiety system, this system relates to the preservation of comfort.
It's about predictable access to essential resources, and this is the system which enables the individual to manage threats or perceived threats, sometimes in a clinical context, to personal or resource security. And the whole system, so not it's called the fear anxiety system. So there's a range of behavioural responses and, and context that trigger this system.
And the anxiety part has a, an anticipatory component to it, which means that the animal can avoid potential danger by being alerted to the potential for harm through anticipatory fear, or so-called anxiety. And if you look at this photograph where somebody is encouraging this puppy to interact with this older dog. The dog is actually holding the puppy and pushing it towards the older dog's face.
You can actually see that both of these dogs at this point are showing clear body language signals associated with anxiety, with, oh my goodness, what's going to happen next. You can see the ears on the adult dog, you can see the eye position, you can see the puppy turning its eye contact away from the older dog. And if the dogs were in control of this encounter and there was no human being involved, then there would be the ability to take avoiding action for these dogs to not engage with each other because they're finding it tense.
It's when humans get involved, of course, that things can go badly wrong, and this person, forcing this puppy and holding it close to the adult dog is going to escalate the potential for these animals not to be able to deal with their anxiety in the way that they want to. The pain system is very important for us as a veterinary profession, because this is a, a branch or a form, if you like, of the fear anxiety system, but it's related to the specific maintenance of body integrity and functioning. So it's both a direct sensation and also a motivation.
And it's activated in response to environmental stimuli which are related to actual or potential tissue damage. And again, it's very important as a protective mechanism. So, yes, it's a negative emotional state, but it's protective in its acute form, remembering that chronic chronic pain, of course, is a disease.
So, what are the potential behavioural responses that we can see to a negative emotional state? Well, certainly, if an animal is in one of these negative states, they can use avoidance. So avoidance being the response that allows you as an individual to increase space and increase interaction with the perceived threat by your own behavioural change.
So, We can use avoidance, or we can also use appeasement. Now, appeasement happens more readily when actually moving away and terminating the interaction, decreasing interaction and increasing space is not entirely beneficial to the individual. So if we have an animal who has, for example, desire seeking motivation in this context of a dog, seen here in the picture, wanting social contacts, coupled with a fear, anxiety motivation because of some uncertainty about the relationship with that other dog in this case, in this photograph, then increasing space and decreasing distance would take away the benefit of social interaction.
But staying in the proximity of the stimulus and increasing the information that the individual has can help to allow social contact to continue whilst also decreasing the fear and anxiety by gathering information to make them feel more certain. And so here we have gathering through active exchange, where there's a giving of information from the one dog and a taking of information by the other. Information can also be gathered passively.
We call that a state of inhibition, where the animal is purely gathering information, but giving very little away. And you can see in the face of this spaniel that he's very definitely taking in information about this other dog, but not engaging with it. So visual information, auditory information, and olfactory information will be being taken in by the spaniel, but he's not going to give anything away.
And then of course we have the potential repulsion, so repulsion will also increase. Sorry. So repulsion will also increase distance, and it will also decrease interaction between the two individuals, but in this case, the behaviour of the individual causes a response in the other animal that then increases space and decreases interaction.
The panic grief system is a system related to survival of the species through survival of the young. It's about the ability to be nurtured, and it's the response that happens when that nurturing is in some way inhibited or withdrawn. So before an animal is able to protect itself, they'll be able, the young animal is able to show, it's emotional arousal through.
The removal of nurturing care, so if their mother, for example, leaves the whelping box as seen in this picture, they show an emotional arousal response which leads to a behavioural response, which shows that they need that nurturing to come back. And in adult dogs, we can get problems developing when that panic or grief system is triggered by a lack of access to a human caregiver rather than to a canine dam. So that nurturing need not necessarily be of a parental nature, particularly in Species which are obligate social species.
And we can see that animals suffer a grief response and often panic in its form is when they are separated from their human caregivers may result in behaviours which can be quite dramatic. The social play system gives information to individuals about their own social competence. It allows them to learn about one another and about being a member of a certain species.
And in socially obligate species like the dog, social play is not just confined to puppies, to youngsters, but actually persists throughout their life. The lust system, this is a system which organises specific reproductive needs, ranges from the attraction to a selection of a mate right through to mating. And care is the system which is associated with the behaviour of the caregiver.
So we talked about the panic grief system, the response shown by the nurtured when their nurturing is removed. This is the emotional system which leads to an individual being nurturing. And again, we think most readily of this being in the form of parental care, but in socially obligate species like the dog and like us and the horse, it can occur in other sorts of bonds as well, friendships as well as parental relationships.
The frustration system is an incredibly important system when we are looking at the topic of dog bites, because the frustration system is triggered whenever there's a failure to meet expectations, to obtain resources, or to retain control. And the feature of a frustration related behaviour is that it will be intense and it will be rapid. So this system intensifies and accelerates the behavioural responses.
But it also favours a repelling response rather than avoidance, inhibition or appeasement. So frustration tends to be associated with these so-called aggressive behaviours, if they don't have control over a situation, or if they're prevented from responding to another emotional motivation by the circumstances that they're in. In cases of aggressive behaviour, the frustration system is often activated in association with one of the other systems, one of the other behavioural systems we've just talked about.
And if you can't respond to that other motivation, and you become frustrated, then because of this tendency to increase the intensity and the speed of the behavioural response and the influence of, of frustration, then you're likely to see a repelling response. And it may be due to either physical or social environment, or it might be related to human interactions and human interventions that causes this frustration. So, for example, here, if this animal that is motivated by fear, anxiety in this situation is not able to use avoidance because of the fact that the, because of the fact that the The barrier around it is preventing it from moving away from its source of fear and anxiety, then it's likely that frustration will become involved.
And if another animal doesn't respond to a signal and doesn't move away or a person engages in a, a, an interaction which causes the animal not to be able to respond to it's. In its underlying emotional motivation, then frustration will occur. For example, here, if we've got an animal again, showing a negative emotional response, being unable to move away from its perceived threat because the owner in this situation is holding on to the lead and and persuading or or forcing the animal to go towards the source of fear.
Then again, we're likely to see frustration. OK, so as I was saying, in terms of aggressive responses, we were talking about how frustration, which is the emotion that happens when you're unable to achieve an expected outcome, and we talked about how that could be associated with other emotional motivational systems. So panic grief, which is the one that is caused by your absence of your nurturer, would lead to a dog, for example, like this in the picture, seeing.
The, seeing their owner going and wanting to prevent that, and getting frustrated and therefore starting to potentially become aggressive. And then we were talking about this dog here whose entire male dog living in a situation where there are entire females around and yet being prevented from being able to get through the gate. Frustration's going to again be involved and in that situation.
If someone went, for example, to try and remove this dog from the gate, got hold of a collar or tried to move him, it's quite likely that you would see an aggressive response, a repelling response through the frustration. And because of the frustration, that repulsion may actually be quite intense in its format and quite potentially dangerous. We also see frustration of social play, and this is quite commonly seen where dogs are motivated to socially play with other members of their species and yet owners I usually because they misinterpret the behavioural signals that they're seeing, they're worried about their dog potentially.
Not engaging well with the other dog, and therefore, they hold them back. That frustration of not being able to engage in social play can then result in a situation of this dog to dog conflict because of the repelling nature of the frustration motivated response. We also see situations where the care system, the system which is associated with the giving of nurturing interactions with others, being frustrated in a false pregnancy situation because of a lack of puppy.
So the dog is the bitch here, sorry, is motivated through prolact. In related to that care system, wanting to be able to look after the puppies which don't exist, they then start to show a caring response to other sorts of situations like toys. And if someone tries to take those toys away, then frustration of the care system is likely to result.
Also, we may see frustration combined with the desire seeking system. So for example, in this picture where the dog has food just out of reach, the desire seeking system being thwarted, frustration occurring, and again, if anyone tried to come and move that dog away from the food, potentially a repelling or so called aggressive response may occur. We also sometimes almost intentionally frustrate certain systems.
For example, the desire seeking system, if we do these sorts of tricks shown here in this photograph, where the treat balanced on the dog's nose, then all of its sensory system, it's, it's visual and it's. The olfactory system is telling it that there is a desired resource within reach, and yet the command from the owner through training to leave it alone is meaning it can't fulfil its behaviour of gaining access to that tree, then you're going to instil frustration. Frustration of the fear anxiety system and also of the pain system in particular becomes specifically relevant in the veterinary context.
And we can see here that dogs in a veterinary context, either in pain or in a state of fear anxiety because of a potential threat to themselves as they perceive it. That if they're in a veterinary context and we need to carry out treatment, what we may find is that they are therefore thwarted because we have to get the job done. And so frustration can become a component alongside the fear of anxiety.
So it's not just that they're in pain, or just that they're fearful or anxious, but also that they're experiencing frustration through an inability to actually respond to that emotional state. So we can see that the why becomes incredibly important and that if we understand the why, we can start to also be better able at predicting where aggressive responses might occur. We also, as well as identifying which emotional system is being triggered, need to understand about emotional arousals, that's the amount of emotion that the individual is experiencing as well as the type.
And we also need to know about their level of resilience, so that's their ability, if you like, to recover from a state of emotional challenge. So in the behavioural consultation, where we're trying to understand why an aggressive behaviour has occurred, in other words, this should we have seen it coming? We need to identify all of the factors, and that really does take time.
It's a long term approach to predicting and modifying forms of confrontational behaviour, and it really, it's the way of moving forward in the long term so that the owners have the ability to predict and therefore to modify both the environment, physically and socially, the dog's learning processes so that we can prevent that problem from occurring in the future. So in order to see this bite coming during a specific interaction, we need to make sure that we have an understanding of those emotional motivations, an appreciation of canine communication, because we need to understand, well, how do these animals express these emotional states? And the key to this is education.
And a programme called Developing, developing Emotional Intelligence in puppies is available as an online course for for vets who want to learn more about how to incorporate that into your practises. So let's return to perceived unpredictability. We know that humans are often unable to recognise the other behavioural responses to negative emotions, so avoidance appeasement and inhibition, which are equally important, potential behavioural responses when there's a negative emotional state.
These are difficult for owners to recognise. So we can see here the dog that's hiding between the owner's legs, showing a combination, in that case, the picture to the left of avoidance and inhibition. So avoidance, yes, moving away and going between the owner's legs.
Inhibition, you can see this dog using visual, very clear visual gathering of information. It will also likely be listening as well and using scent. And again, the little dog by the tyre of the vehicle, you can see potential to avoid, so trying to get away, but again, that inhibited state and also the inhibited state in the little dog on the consulting room table.
And then on the right hand side, we see the dog changing from that more inhibited state into a more active appeasement state, showing that characteristic canine appeasement behaviour of licking the skin where they expect to find scent information. Not obviously a sign of affection, as facial contact is usually in people, but for dogs, a sign of appeasement, a sign of collecting information, but getting close to the individual they're collecting it from and exchanging information rather than being inhibited. So, warning signs may often in many of these cases, been present for some time.
And the dog's emotional state has not actually changed. So when the bite occurs, the repulsion behaviour is selected. If that animal has already been trying to use other strategies of avoidance, inhibition, or appeasement, and they've not been noticed, the dog hasn't changed.
The emotional state is exactly the same, but the outward expression may have altered, and now we have a situation where the behaviour is obviously more challenging and more potentially dangerous. This is a video that I have been lent by, Deborah Horwitz, a canine behaviourist, sorry, a veterinary behaviourist from the state. So I'm very grateful to her and I hope this is going to play OK cos it does seem to be a little bit juddery at the moment.
OK, so if we, hopefully, if you could see in that, in that video, although I'm sorry, it was slightly, juddery, you could see that that bite, that launch at the, at the nurse's face at the end of the video may have appeared to have been very sudden and inverted commas unpredictable, and certainly that was the view of the owners and also the nurse. She wasn't expecting that to happen. But actually, if you'd have looked at that video all the way through right from the beginning, you could see that the dog was engaging in inhibited behaviour.
You could see it taking information in, you could see some appeasement interactions, the leaning, which was misinterpreted by the people as the dog urinate, wanting to urinate on the person, when actually what he was doing was leaning into the person through appeasement. And then when that was rejected, and he was pushed away, then he had to change his strategy when the appeasing and the inhibiting wasn't working, then he had no choice but to use a repulsion response. And by looking at that behaviour, the the other behavioural responses in the lead up, it is actually very possible to predict that interaction.
So prediction relies on understanding emotional motivations, understanding the presence of behavioural responses to negative emotion, and making sure that we pay more attention, particularly to the more subtle signs of communication. We need to give equal, importance to avoidance appeasement, inhibition and repulsion. So yes, of course, by.
Are serious because of the potential consequences, but the emotional state of the dog can be the same and lead to these other responses which, if ignored, can cause a a tendency to go towards a repulsion response. So repulsion responses are not the only one we need to be avoiding, but also those that can precede them. And recognising the warning signs involves understanding body posture and understanding movement, the way in which the animal is responding to give us an overall picture of that emotional state.
And negative systems are are associated with various types of body posture and movement. So things like pulling away, resisting going towards something, or leaning backwards, whilst engaging, as you can see in the bottom picture of the setter, where you've got That classic extended body posture, or the hackles being raised, as you can see in the bottom right hand picture of the Labrador, where that negative emotion is being demonstrated by the raised hackles. And if we see these behaviours, and we actually take note of them, if we don't then force the animal to go into the situation it's trying to avoid, then we are going to reduce the risk of a repulsion response being needed.
And facial expression is incredibly important in indicating emotional state. So examples would include, for example, their ear position, and we've talked about that in some of the other photos that we've already looked at that that ear position backward on the head with the tension, in the musculature over the top of the head is very characteristic of negative emotion. Pupillary dilatation is something that's important, but obviously needs to be considered in relation to the light level in in the environment that you're in.
But turning the head away, averting gaze, these are also forms of avoidance, and the reason I tend not to use the terminology of fight and flight and instead use repulsion and avoidance is because of the fact that flight suggests. That the animal would be actively running away, when actually this animal that's turning its head away, averting the gaze is still avoiding. It's still using its behaviour to decrease interaction and increase space from a perceived threat.
And equally, repulsion doesn't have to be fighting. It doesn't have to be physical confrontation. So it may be a grumble or a growl.
Also, we need to think about the tail, as dogs, the tail is a very expressive indicator of emotional state, and fear or anxiety is indicated by the tail being in a downward position, clamped often, with the tail head clamped over. For the anus, because as well as being a postural signal, this is also a way of reducing the availability of cent information. So basically shutting down the amount of information that the individual is giving away.
Wagging tail is often considered by owners to be just a sign that the dog is happy. You may even have heard people say it was totally unpredictable. He was wagging his tail and then bit somebody, as if that really shouldn't be possible.
But a wagging tail gives us a clue to their emotional state, but doesn't actually tell us, just by its movement, just by the fact it is moving, whether the animal is. Happy or not, we need, therefore, to look at the way in which the tail is wagged. Because, for example, wagging of the tip of the tail only, as you can see by the blurring of this tail at the tip and the fact that you can see the tail head, much more clearly.
So the tail head is quite stationary. The tip is moving frantically. And this is indicative of a negative emotional state.
So yes, the tail is wagging, but the animal is in a negative emotional state. And in this picture, you can actually clarify that also by looking at the ear position and the posi and the eyes and the watching that is also indicative of an anxious dog. Relaxed and rhythmic wagging that goes from the whole of the tail, from the base to the tip is indicative of positive emotional state.
So yes, it's true that a dog wagging its tail may be a happy dog, but not necessarily. And in situations where dogs are in so-called emotional conflict, so where they, they want to engage but have some form of anxiety, which of course, a classic greeting behaviour here, where the dog is showing a displacement stretch, is also averting its eye contact, and has this so-called windmill tail wagging. So we know that the emotional drive, whichever emotional drive is, the amount of the emotion that's, that's being generated is also gonna be important because if you have a high level of emotional drive, if you have a lot of emotion.
Arousal that compromises ability to make appropriate decisions and I'm sure you're, you've all been in situations where that happens, where your emotional level is higher, you're getting worried about something, and therefore making an appropriate decision is harder. Also, if you have high emotional arousal because of that inability to make rational decisions, the risk of selecting a repulsion response, risk of biting is actually increased. And a high level of emotional arousal is also associated with behaviours which are indicators of the potential for this behaviour to start changing.
And these are called displacement behaviours. And we can think about displacement behaviours as basically being any behaviour, a normal behaviour, being seen in an abnormal context. But these are associated with any high level of emotional arousal, whether it's positive or whether it's negative.
And examples would include things like shaking as if you're wet. So again, the normal behaviour would be shaking like this if the dog is wet, but shaking like this when they're not can be a displacement behaviour, as can yawning and stretching, which could be normal after a period of sleep, but abnormal when it's in the middle of a social encounter, for example, and also lip licking. And these displacement behaviours are very good predictive indicators of the potential for there to be a problem, because if the animal is in this sort of high level of arousal, and they're in a situation where they perceive some kind of threat, it is quite likely that a repulsion response could be selected.
Of course, they could still use avoidance, appeasement, or inhibition. And these behaviours are important, therefore, as part of our prediction process in dog bite prevention. This sink is just an analogy that I've developed to illustrate this combination of understanding, firstly, the emotional motivation.
So that's the, the water that's being put into the animal's emotional sink or emotional capacity, which can be coming from one tap, which would be the hot tap, that would be a negative emotional input, or from the cold tap, a positive emotional input. And then we can think about the flow rate from those taps as indicating the intensity of that emotion. So you may have a large amount of water coming from the hot tap or a small amount, and equally from the cold tap.
And then we can also think about the level of residue. So if you've got water coming into a sink, which is virtually empty, that has only a tiny amount of residue in the bottom, then you have maximised the potential for this animal to be able to use its full sink size or its full capacity. Whereas if you have a sink that's virtually full at the point where you start the interaction, then of course it's more likely that you are going to have an overflow because your relative capacity, your available capacity is reduced.
And those displacement behaviours we were just talking about are equivalent to the overflow hole in this metaphorical sink. So if they are showing that shaking as if wet, that yawning, that stretching, it means that the level of emotion is very close to the point of capacity for that individual, and the risk is that the animal is not going to be able to cope. So the risk of overflow is going to happen when the sink is small, when the tap's turned on full, and when there's a high level of residue in the sink at the time.
But obviously, whether or not a flood happens is also associated with whether the people around recognise the signs of impending overflow. If you hear the water dribbling out of an overflow hole in the sink, and you go and switch the taps off, then you're likely to avert the flood. You're not going to actually carry on and have the problematic overflow.
So understanding those displacement behaviours is really important in emotionally managing these individuals. The behaviours can often be very subtle, and many owners and even practise staff are oblivious to them. And in a clinical context, it can actually be very difficult to observe those displacement behaviours if you are engaged in examining the dog.
So if you are concentrating on looking in the dog's ears, or you're concentrating on examining it, and obviously, the same could happen with a cat, as, I just had to put a cat in because I can't do a talk without a cat. But a second person in the consulting room can really help, and not necessarily the owner, but a qualified person like a nurse. We're very privileged in the UK to often have veterinary nurses of very high quality in the consulting room with us, and they can be really, really helpful in helping to notice those subtle displacement behaviours and therefore enable us to predict when a confrontational interaction may occur.
So, what we see is that dog bites can occur without warning, but actually that's very unusual. I would say that when a bite genuinely occurs without warning, I would be extremely suspicious of an underlying medical problem, a neurological problem, or potentially a pain related issue. Majority of cases, by far, can actually be predicted.
If we understand the motivation, then we can actually understand that this animal is likely to need to use a repelling response. Certainly if we can understand that avoidance and inhibition and appeasement are ways of dealing with negative emotion, we can make sure that the environment that they're in allows those, more passive types of responses to actually be successful. But we need to be able to notice and interpret their repertoire of communication.
We need to notice that that animal is trying to move away, remembering that avoidance may not be real actual movement. It may just be that turning of the head. And we need to be able to recognise when an animal is being inhibited, when they're looking and watching and listening, and they're trying to gather information.
Because if we don't see those things, that's when we have the difficulty. And lack of human knowledge and understanding is so often involved in dog bite scenarios where sadly, when we look at them in retrospect and we take a history, we're wait, we're sitting there wondering what, how did that actually happen? How, how was that allowed to happen?
And the usual reason that it happened was because of this lack of understanding and lack of observation. So if we can increase the level of education both for veterinary practise staff and for dog owners, then we can start to think about dog bite prevention, whether we're interacting with dogs in the home, or whether we're interacting with them in our professional context in a veterinary practise, it's important to pay really close attention to often very subtle canine signs of communication. And considering the the situation from the dog's perspective rather than from our perspective, will allow us to be more aware of the potential that negative emotions are being triggered.
And I just want to finish by showing you this video, which doesn't have any sound on it on purpose, and so I really want you to look at the behaviour of the dog, and not to be listening to what the people are saying. So As the dog actually took hold of that hand and bit, The man was heard to say, I did not see that coming. I hope that, even though the video sadly was slightly jittery, and I apologise for that, I hope you could very definitely see that coming.
You could see the warning signs, you could recognise the avoidance and the inhibition in this dog. And there was absolutely no reason for that behaviour to escalate into a repulsion response or to alter into a repulsion response. If the people involved in that scenario had been knowledgeable about dog behaviour, had actually understood how dogs perceive and respond to situations, that bite need never have happened.
Thank you.
