Great. Thank you very, very, very much, for inviting me to do this. What I'm going to try to do in the hour that I have is, give you an introduction to the topical literature that is out there now with findings that will hopefully help change the way you practise.
And while I'm doing that, I'm going to talk about how I think you should read these papers. In other words, things you should look for. And I'm also going to note when certain papers are available to you when they're open source because if they're open access or open source papers, anybody can get them, and you don't have to have expensive The problem that practitioners usually have is that they can't get the journals and they really don't have the time to read all the papers and you don't read them critically like a scientist if you're if you're in practise because you have a whopping 10 minutes to To do all of this and having seen that all of those worlds, I'm gonna try to just address that and give you a real flavour of some of the emergent ideas that could really help you.
And now you're looking at a picture of my three Australian shepherds, playing in the North Atlantic off Prince Edward Island in Canada. They're quite lucky dogs. OK, so we're gonna talk about emergent data in behavioural medicine and how to read and use the literature.
And I'm gonna talk about errors that people make, sometimes because the big one is that, and we all do it, that we think we know something that we don't know, or we think we know something that is actually not known, or we've actually got it wrong. And all of those things are possible, but people don't usually look for them. So, Gary Petronnik, who is at Tufts University.
Published this paper on who's minding the bibliography in the journal that I actually edit. And one of the things that that Gary Noted was that we all believe that, when you've got, one of the bully breeds, they grab onto people harder than, do other breeds of dogs. And the question he asked was, how do we know this?
People toss around all these numbers of how much pressure a German shepherd versus a bully breed versus a Labrador retriever can put on somebody when they exhibit one of the bites, like the one. Sarah showed and how do we know this? So we started to trace back in the literature things like 400 PSI 250 to 400 pounds per square inch.
Here you've got, and these are recent citations, so the red, yeah, sorry, the white citations are recent citations, up to 1800 PSI. OK, these are all pretty recent, recent papers. Well, if you Trace them back to the source, which are these black ones.
OK. First of all, the Chicago Tribune has never been accused of being a scientific journal, but, here they tell you that Dobermans come up at 1200 to 1500, German shepherds at 1200 to 1500, and Rottweilers at 2000 pounds per square inch. So where does this all come from?
Well, it comes from a a comment made apparently at Lackland Air Force Base that looked at 150 to 200 pounds per square inch, and maybe as much as 4 to 450 pounds per square inch for a bite. And honestly, people at Lackland have looked for this set of data and no one can find it. So what we have here is fiction.
And this has gotten passed on and passed on and passed on, like it's gospel. And in fact, we don't know how hard those dogs bite. Could we measure it in an apparatus?
Sure. Can we measure these with strain gauges now? Yes.
Should we? Possibly, it might be just smarter to realise that if you want a trained bite, that's very different than having a household pet whom you wish not to bite. So, this, this is something that happens in the literature and it happens, and people believe that because they've seen, a measurement or a statement that it means something.
And I just wanted to start out with a big caution that in Fact, it may not. And Gary's one of the few people I know who has had the patience to go back and do this, and I, it's a wonderful paper. And one of the great things about it is it's open access.
So, in fact, anybody can read and use this paper. OK. The second issue I want to take on are the, temperament tests, and I'm sure everybody's everybody's heard of these.
And this is a paper in Applied Animal behaviour Science. Again, Gary Petronnik is an author on this, and he's actually an epidemiologist. Amy Marder is the behaviour person here, and there are other behaviour people.
Sheila Sergeson is a boarded specialist, and they had a lot of people involved in this study that involved the SPCA, which is where many of these people come from. And they looked at dogs in the shelter situation who reacted to the test where they try to take food, a bowl of food away from the dog. And in the United States, this test is pretty ubiquitous.
It uses a plastic hand that's probably scary to many dogs in itself called an assessor hand. And they were curious about how many of these dogs who were aggressive to Having their food taken away in the shelter were aggressive when they got home. OK.
So, they they tell you how many dogs they looked at, and here are their data. And one of the things that they, now this is a small sample, OK, this is not a lot of dogs. Take a take a look at the number of dogs.
20 dogs who were aggressive, 77 weren't for a total of 97 dogs. So this is a small study. But we can look at the power of the test and how statistically significant these results could be.
So dogs that had food-related aggression in the shelter. OK, and they look at how many of them were positive and how many of them were negative after adoption. In other words, these guys did it, these guys didn't.
Dogs who were negative in this shelter, 17 of them were aggressive to food, after they went, went home, and, most of them weren't. And then they calculated the sensitivity and the specificity of the test, and you're gonna see this slide again. In a few papers when we talk about why these things matter.
And, you know, sensitivity tells you how much you can trust your positives, specificity trust tells you how much you can trust your negatives. The positive predictive value of this test is only 55%, and the negative predictive value is better, and you can trust your negatives here, but you can't trust your positives. Well, that's really unfortunate because in the United States, most dogs who react to this test are euthanized.
They never get any further. So one of the things they did that's nice is they used a, a semi-quantitative method to see what the dogs did by asking, never, rarely, sometimes frequently, always. And they found out that if they looked at the dogs once they got to homes, whether they reacted to meals or, you know, delicious treats or table food or, you know, stuff that wasn't part of their regular meal compendium.
They got increased responses for the slightly delicious foods. But if you look at what they actually did, most of these dogs did threatening behaviours that people noticed, OK, and they didn't do them most of the time, most of them. One did it always.
They didn't really snap or lunge very often, and pretty much no one bit all the time. So that was interesting in itself. And they recommended that, in fact, these dogs be allowed to go home because even though these dogs occasionally exhibited aggression towards food, not a single person in the study said it was a problem for them because they were able to recognise these signals.
They taught them to recognise the signals. They were even able to decrease the aggressions by putting the dog in an area where, guess what, they were allowed to eat undisturbed. I want you to think about how most of you would react if you were in a very expensive restaurant in in London or in Johannesburg and someone came over and started to eat your dinner or take it away from you when you were eating.
I don't think most of us would react well to that, so I think we need to think that dogs are probably pretty the same pretty much the same. So, Gary Petronnik went back and again another open access paper, everybody has access to this, and went back and looked at a variety of data sets, including this one in which he was a co-author. And they looked at how reliable that sensitivity and specificity were.
Remember we talked about, you're looking at 39% and you're looking at, you know, a, a slightly higher negative rate, but 30, 39% for a positive rate. So they looked at all of these tests and what you find out is there's generally a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity. So your positives and your negatives usually have some sort of a trade-off.
And these tests really aren't very good for positives. There are a couple in here that are excellent for positives. I wanna, I wanna note those.
In a meta-analysis, meaning you looked at a bunch of different studies, you get a very high positive for cardiac CT for coronary artery disease. In other words, you have a, an invasive, somewhat provocative test that is looking for one specific set of pathologies that are well defined. And you can find that on imaging.
And in fact, that also has, is pretty good for negative results, but it's better for positive, so. When you see these patterns, that's usually the way it goes. You're in culture.
Well, this makes sense. You're looking, you're actually counting something, you're counting colonies of bacteria, and those bacteria are known to to cause the infection. But if you look down for things that we might be thinking about, if you look at future criminal offending or future violent offending, lethality for domestic violence.
My God, we do a lousy job of identifying the negatives. OK, so when you look at this again, remember, 39%, 87%. So when they looked at this study and some other studies, they modelled these sensitivities and specificities.
And what that's what's showing in this cartoon here. So that what you're actually seeing is if you assumed you had a realistic sensitivity and specificity, so you, you've got a very good positive test and a not very good negative test, OK? The 84 dogs wouldn't exhibit the problem.
16 dogs would. For every 10 dogs who tested positive and were not adopted, you would have killed off 8 really lovely dogs, OK? If you then had an unrealistically optimistic expectation where these were both excellent tests, you're still the best you're doing is half and half.
You're still off by that much. So 5 dogs who could have gone to homes didn't. OK.
So really, it's no better than flipping a coin. So based on these studies, the group at the ASPCA followed up and they had a survey that used only 96 dogs, but these dogs all guarded their food in that shelter situation. And then they basically asked what people saw when they sent these dogs home, and they had checked to these, they had used these behaviours, and again, noticed they'd used the assessor hand in the safer test.
And then they looked at these, and they found out that 6 adopters reported 1 incidence of food guarding in the 1st 3 weeks. They looked at him in 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months. They basically taught these people to leave the dog alone and to gradually introduce food items.
They found that by the end of the 3 months, no dog was really guarding their food anymore because no one was threatening them by taking it away. And the return rate of dogs who had guarded their food was 5%, whereas the return rate to the shelter of dogs who had not guarded their food was double that. So, here's the poll question.
And Anthony, you're welcome to take this back and do the poll. That's great, Karen, let me do the The Polish have launched that. How helpful are tests about dogs' reaction to food in shelter situations?
Are they extremely useful? Are they somewhat useful, or are they misleading? I think people have been listening.
Karen, you'll be pleased to know. Well, I hope so. I know it's horrendously late for so many people, so I think they're heroic.
They are absolutely heroic. So we've got, about half the people voted, so some must be snoozing, presumably. So come on, wake up and a vote we'll give you another 10 seconds to, to make your decision.
We won't check up who got right and who got wrong, so, just go for it. So we've got just over half voted and so I'll close the poll, we've got 6% saying it's extremely useful. 11% saying somewhat useful and actually a lot of people saying misleading, the false positive rate is enormous, and the doctors can understand and readily manage the vast majority of dogs who may care about some foods, that's 81%.
And, and that's actually the right answer. It can be useful to identify the dogs who might react so that you would warn the people and educate them. You know, but you don't know if that dog will react in the home, because, in fact, the vast majority of these dogs did not react in their home when they got there.
And that's the thing to think about. So this is, another open access paper. It's in plus one, and, everybody could have access to this.
And it goes back to what Sarah was talking about, and how well do people read dog behaviour. And this is, A paper that asked about how well people recognise dog motions using visual signals, and they had 4 groups of people they looked at, people who had low exposure and low experience to dogs. They were very unfamiliar with them, owners of dogs, professionals who worked with dogs in some capacity for less than 10 years, and professionals who work.
For 10 plus years with dogs. And they, they showed them, a series of videos. So it was nice because it was standardised, and you want to look for that.
How did they evaluate this? The safer test in the way it was done in these studies was standardised. Here, we've got the videos were standardised, everybody saw the same video.
They actually had, 2,163 participants in this study. And they had a panel of specialists. So this isn't one person's opinion.
It's not a small sample here. It's a large sample. So, when they showed everybody happy videos, people are pretty good with happy dogs.
They, on, on a whole, they agree that those dogs are happy, regardless of their experience. But you get into the fear zone, and if you're not a specialist, boy, you're very uncomfortable. And when they went on and broke this down by the things that Sarah talked about, you know, looking at the eyes, looking at the ears, looking at the mouth, looking at the tail, looking at the legs, the things I want you to realise is that, these patterns are not all in the same direction.
So, here, ears, eyes, and mouth. They were much more able to recognise fearful examples than happy examples. But for legs and tail, that was a happy dog, and that was the only dog they felt really comfortable with.
So people, if you look at this and you break down the individual behaviours, specialists are better and boy, we Just don't read these individual behaviours well, and we don't do it well, especially on dogs that are not ecstatic. And when they reported how difficult it was and how accurate they were, sure enough, people thought they were, it was, easier, you know, to, to rate dogs that were happier, and they felt that they were more accurate with dogs that were happier, and that was everybody. So these are difficult issues and you can see why you get into the situations that Sarah talked about and it's why we need good quantitative data.
OK, so what do some of these education programmes and what do, what do people perceive supervision to be, what are the effects of that? So this is another paper from, from our journal out of . This is out of Austria, and these people looked at a large number of questions.
They had hundreds of questions, and what they found was, in fact, Dog owners versus experts diverged widely on most of the questions. They had a series of 5 photos that were just to evaluate, again, standardised, the same photo, everybody looks at the same photo. These photos were standardised so that, they asked people how much risk they thought they were, and we'll run quickly through the 5 photos.
So, here's the first photo. A child is sitting next to the dog, the dog's lying on its back, the child holds the front paws. Here the child is standing in front of the dog and letting it lick out a yoghurt cup.
Here, the dog is in its bed curled up, and the child is on top of the dog in the bed with it. Here the dog is against the child's crib and against the door in the wall, while the child is crawling towards it. And here for some reason, this guy is imitating Michael Jackson and hanging his child over a dog's head, and that's an infant.
OK, and the dog is looking at the child's face. So when we look at this, and you can decide what you think about this, but Experts really only thought that the child standing in front of the dog and gently offering that yoghurt cup and not getting in the dog's face was OK. And pretty much most people who participated in the study agreed in the direction of the pattern.
In other words, if you rated them on a 5. Leichhardt scale that, the need to intervene is very low versus The need to intravenous high, people got the general direction. So here it's low, but it's higher in all these other categories.
But they made two mistakes. The experts were far more serious about this. These are the, these are the individual owners evaluations.
The experts really felt like they weren't taking it seriously enough that they would have been more, more concerned. And without exception, they all thought that their family dog was safer than an unfamiliar dog. So they wouldn't provide the same type of guidance, and that's a problem.
So here's another poll question for you, Anthony. Right, great. I'm just launching that one for you.
And I'll read it while you're launching so that we'll save some time. We want to ensure dogs are safe for children and other living things. So based on these studies, which are representative of related studies, how well do non-professionals, even if they've had some education because all of the papers coming out or supporting this, even if they've taken a little education course, how well do they recognise canine behaviours associated with fear and aggression in common bite circumstances?
You know, extremely well, well enough that most bites are prevented or badly even if they've had a little short course and some, some small amount of training. OK, so we've got, just another 5 seconds. We, we've got, nobody thinking extremely well.
3% thinking well enough that most bites are prevented. So, and then we've got, 97% saying badly, even if they've had a short course of training. And I think that both of, both Sarah and I are, are saying this, you know, yes, we are preventing some bites.
People are beginning to get it. This has to be not a one-off. This has to be a consistent part of how we educate veterinarians, the entire veterinary community, how we educate paediatricians, how we educate children in schools.
This has to be an integrated approach. We share our lives with these animals. They can be the defining circumstance that turn children into humane adults.
We really need to, to understand canine behaviour and share that. OK, so, I'm gonna take on the issue of dominance in dogs, and I'm going to take it on very briefly and in a very truncated. Manner and I'm going to talk briefly about the one paper that has looked at what is an ethological concept that is called formal dominance.
And this is again an open access paper, everybody can read this, out of the group in the Netherlands. And, I, I just wanna say a few things. They start out their abstract by saying that a dominance hierarchy is an important feature of social organisation of groups of living animals.
Not everybody agrees with that. And there are numerous reasons you might have a rank hierarchy, but it might be different for different things. So in other words, some individuals are better at foraging, some individuals are better at protecting.
But there is a concept of formal dominance that asks, is there a consistent pattern to wins and losses that can be detected? And this is the asymmetry argument. So this is an ethological concept about asymmetries, and they look at various things, physical power, stamina, personality, weight, weaponry, age, for what is called formal dominance.
The difference here is that this is now changing, OK? So the primate people who looked at this for years now are looking at other hierarchies. So they're looking at other affiliative things, who grooms who, who sleeps with whom, who touches whom.
So that this is just one agonistic. Measure of these behaviours. So, many of the things that are, are listed here are, assertions where the for example, where they say the relationships may be stable over time.
Well, what's interesting is his Historically, Scott and Fuller, when they established these relationships between puppies with bones, and they found that, yes, they could demonstrate this form of formal dominance where A usually controlled the bone over B, B usually controlled it over C. But they comment that it has nothing to do with later social relationships or how dogs work out in personality, temperament, or problem solving because they followed these dogs. The other thing that you need to know is that, and everybody who does clustering algorithms will tell you this, that if you have small samples, Anything clusters, so you can always rank something, it just may not be biologically meaningful.
So this is a relatively small sample, but it is a group of dogs who are living together in a colony situation. And there's another complication here in their group. Most of their dogs are quite young.
In fact, these dogs are all, these, these dogs may be in the midst of or beginning to enter into social maturity where you prune brain neurons and your personality changes, and these are, these are babies. So one of the things that many of the primate people are now doing are only comparing Across the same animals in a developmental stage. So in other words, they would control for development.
Cognitive development, social development, and age. When they looked at this, they found that two low postures, low and low on back and 3 behaviours, body tail wag, mouth lick and pass under head. They thought were signals of submission and that dogs who wagged their body tail and and stood over other dogs, you know, and caused the other dogs to lower their postures were, showing formal dominance.
OK, now, because they have measured those behaviours, we can ask the question. Do those behaviours show up only in circumstances where animals are contesting something, or are those behaviours signals that may have nothing to do with social status and are conveying something about the underlying state or intent or risk. So a bunch of papers have come out that have looked at this, and this is one of them.
It's called, Down but not Out, and it's looking at the supine postures that they talk about as facilitators of play. And there was no agonistic behaviour in the dogs in this study. But many of the dogs engaged in this rolling behaviour.
The rolling over determined the bout length of play. A lot of rollovers were defensive to avoid nape bites in play or offensive to bait in the other dog for play so that you could turn around and grab that dog. And the asymmetries in the performance of these rollovers that involved the lower body posture.
And the other behaviours that had been assumed to be submissive depended on the play context, rollovers were associated with shortened bout intervals. There's no association with traditional measures of dominance in this study. OK, let's look at another study.
This is a study that looked at asymmetry and signals in play again with dogs out of a different group. And they looked at 203 play sessions in a park, and they looked at play asymmetry, and it didn't differ between known and unknown dogs. That was sort of fascinating cause they had predicted that it might.
And they found out that the number of play bows given. Positively affected the length of play. So the previous studies showed that you would shorten the bowel length if you did a rollover, but you would then play more.
Here you will affect the length of the play bow by the play bows. The number of players affects the overall length of play, so 3 or 4 dogs in. Play boughs and barks were common when the soliciting dog could see the other dogs they were playing with.
If they couldn't see them, they didn't give some of these signals. Relaxed open mouth displays were not associated with bites at all, and they could affirm that a play modality in dogs isn't predictive of any of these serious formal dominance relationships. Play fighting seems to actually have a role in social cohesion.
Rather than maintaining any type of social order based on dominance, and in fact, they had an opposite finding. But when you think about some of this, they talked about wagging the tail to the left or right. This is an older study done by Quanta and his group, who's looked at handedness.
And what's interesting is they did it in this stereotactic apparatus. It's a very small sample size because very few dogs are going to agree to do this, but you can see the tail here. And the dog is held in this apparatus and can see out the front, which is down the bottom here, and they walk at different things past the dog, and then they measure the angle that the dog deviates.
From 90 degrees here, here's the 90 degrees, and they do this with high-tech video imaging and a very compliant dog because most dogs wouldn't do this. And I just want you to, to notice that when they're with the owner, OK, the dogs, you'll notice they wag the tail to the right more often than they wag the tail to the left, and they wag it pretty frequently. When they're with an unknown human being.
There's still that right bias, but boy, the frequency changes and the difference changes. When it's with a cat, woo, very different, no-handedness bias. When it's without any stimulus, now they wag to the left more, and when it's with an unfamiliar dog, they've completely changed these.
Now, I would warrant that another dog notices that. And if these types of subtle signals turn out to be statistically significant patterns like they are here, I strongly suggest that maybe we'd like to look at these patterns in interactions because they may be telling us something, not just about the dog's underlying emotional state, but what the dog is trying to convey in those signals. And the group at PISA has begun to do this.
And they've looked at what they've called calming signals, which they define as de-escalating. Any aggressive display. And they looked at How often certain behaviours, these behaviours are taken from an ethogram.
So they constructed the ethogram and they have their definitions and their numbers. So they looked at head turning, licking the nose, freezing, turning away, sniffing, licking each other's mouths, play boughs, sitting paw lifting, lying down, low wagging. They've got the behaviours that were in that dominant study, curving, softening the eyes.
These are things they could see quite easily in their video. They looked at close interaction, interaction at the difference in distance and no interaction. And sure enough, close interactions, you turn to the head.
You licked the nose, you froze, you turned away, and you got smaller. At a distance, you did very different behaviours and very different behavioural frequencies. So it matters how close you are, OK.
Does it matter whether or not you know the dog? So here are the behaviours again. Oh yes, it matters greatly how well you know the dog.
If it's an unfamiliar dog, you engage in head turning, licking your own nose, freezing, getting small. These are all behaviours that are conveying that you don't want to be a threat. There's some degree of uncertainty.
You're being cautious, you're minimising risk, licking the other dog's nose. You do this really only when you know that other dog, which makes sense. Finally, they looked at the actual frequency that they saw these behaviours for unfamiliar and familiar dogs.
And if you look at the freezing behaviours, they were much more, they were much more common. In the unfamiliar dogs. And if you looked at the head turning behaviours, the turning away, the smaller.
The sniffing the ground, the low wagging. They were more familiar and unfamiliar, they were more common in unfamiliar dogs. Those are behaviours that are now shared with the dogs they say in the dominant study are submissive.
So what you actually have here is dogs conveying information that they are sending a calming signal to use their terminology, that they don't know enough to assess the risk and they wish to de-escalate this. Certainly familiar dogs lick each other's mouths, they do curving and they do play bows, and you, you know, they'll lick their own nose, you'll see a difference in the frequency of these behaviours. So if you take these studies on play behaviour, tail wags, and signalling of dogs together, I think the story about how we interact is more complex than it could be represented by any simple or even elaborate dominance argument, which is the conclusion that the bird and primate people are coming to.
This is an interesting paper, this is a human paper out of PNAS in the in the US and it talks about who we let touch us, OK? Very, very timely. Given the hashtag #MeToo movement in the US and around the world right now.
But this is what they found culturally across cultures, there are cultural differences and these people are anthropologists, they were looking at who would you let touch you. And the blue individuals are males, and the red individuals are females, and this is the front and this is the back, and this is the taboo zone, and this is for males. So males will not let male strangers touch them over a very wide area.
What you'll find is males will let females touch them whether they know them, whether they're related to them. It's, it's pretty amazing, that males are so much easier with letting people touch them than than females might be. But the point of this illustration, which you can just get in two seconds looking at it, is that we don't interact with everybody the same way.
And that if we want a deep understanding of why dogs exhibit the behaviours they do, one of the things we may want to consider is how well they know each other and what the real relationships are there, which is one of the things the PISA group showed in the paper by Marridietal on, whether or not you know the dog and what behaviours you exhibit. So, one of the things they found is that the, the zone you let people touch, depends on your different relationships and that affects your social networks. We haven't used this approach yet in dogs, and I would very much like to see it used because everybody's focused, all dominance focuses on threats and responses.
But really, we need to look at what happens when you're ill, passive affiliations, teachers, models, sleep, when there's a play, when there's a threat, who explores, who grooms, how related you are, what we just talked about food sharing and food avoidance. So, here's the next poll question and while Anthony gets it up, I'll read it. I wasn't going to include poll questions, but people kept asking, so I threw in about 7 of them.
So how well does the concept of dominance, formal or not, and there are many, many kinds of dominance that I didn't discuss, . How does that reflect the complexity and commonness of canine signalling within social systems between dogs? It's the only measure we need to understand a behaviour.
It defines all aspects of the system, or canine social systems rely on complex signalling and interaction, and when signalling is not focused on fighting and, and, or, you know, other things are studied, fighting is in fact pretty rare. So what do you think? Because I've given you a real representative sample of papers that have been published quite recently.
So people are voting there, we're giving them I think they're having a think about it. And the reason they're having to have a think about it. It's complex.
It's complex, and we've been taught that there is a dominant system, and it's only in the past 10 to 15 years that broad groups of people question this. 25-30 years ago, Thelma Rowell questioned it about baboons, and when she ranked them by a dominant system, she got a completely different rank when she ranked them by affiliation. Mm.
So it's a tough question. Yeah, no, it is, we seem to be going mainly for the 3, C, so canine social systems rely on complex signalling and interaction and signalling not focused on fighting or studied is studied. Fighting is in fact rare and not a driver of these interactions.
So 93% say that, and then 7% saying it defines all aspects of these systems, so. That's what people have been taught. Yeah.
And I think that as more of these, as, as behaviour is looked at in a more complex way and this is more emergent, We'll change our minds. And one of the reasons that this matters is, you know, when we use terms like dominance, they should only really being used in the social system for which they were intended, so dog dog. But it got translated in dog training to dominance.
You must dominate your dog, you must do the things that Sarah showed in that last video with the food bowl. Which is horrendous. And one of the things we're going to find out is that when you do that, you may be putting yourself at risk.
So, let's go on and, and that's the one question I'll tell you that you're going to be thinking about days later when you revisit this presentation because as you see that we've looked at social cognition and we're going to talk about some brain imaging, you'll see that this is not quite as clear cut as I think many of us believed in the beginning. Social cognition in dogs began to get attention in the, beginning of this century, which really wasn't that long ago, but it sounds spiffy to say it that way, and Brian Hare has been at the, the forefront of this movement. Brian Hare is actually an anthropologist.
And they were looking at how you communicate about things that are hidden, and they decided to look at chimpanzees, which is, is what he was studying, and social signalling because chimps are very good at reading maps, and they're very good at using computer maps to find things. But how do you communicate with someone about something that's hidden? And then one of the things that was A problem is we don't live with chimpanzees.
So we do live with dogs. So you could use dogs as a group of animals with whom we live and ask that question, and then you need a control group for the ones, excuse me, that are canids that don't live with us, so they had hand rear wolves. And the shock of all of this was that the domestic dogs did best.
With all three signals. So if you pointed at something, if you gazed at something, or if you knocked on a box, the domestic dogs did better for all of those, and that started to raise questions about is this something that's inherent in domestication? Is this something that's inherent in canids?
Well, the wolves didn't do as well, but how much exposure had they had to people? Is there a learning component? And a lot of people began to use these tests.
And one of the things that emerged from this is that exposure matters. So whether or not dogs are quote unquote pre-adapted through domestication, through how we have changed them, and they may have also changed us, to live with humans. How you live matters.
So the group out of France looked at the effects of shelter housing on how sensitive these dogs were to human social cues, and they found out that when you did these standardised tests of pointing and gazing and knocking, shelter. Dogs did not do as well as pet dogs. Now, part of that could be that they were in the shelter and they were experiencing a negative cognitive bias that they were, that their, their responses were suppressed.
Because they believed that they couldn't have any effective change over their environment and their world, focus may also have been an issue. They may not have learned to focus. So, Udell it all looked at a group of pet dogs and shelter dogs.
And they looked at how, how well they did certain trials, and they found out that lo and behold pet dogs did much better than random and shelter dogs did worse than random. But When another group of individuals said, well, what if we change the subject of the focus from our signal to the dogs giving us a signal? And they put out food, and they either put out food that was near the human, or they put out food that was on a shelf above the human, so that the dog was going to have to either look to the side or look away and look back to the human.
What did dogs do? Well, sure enough, when food's involved and they can see what you're communicating about and you ask them what they'll do, shelter dogs can communicate just fine. So the response of not knowing the signal seems when you're giving it to them seems to be due to exposure and to expectations and to previous experience, and these studies can't separate that.
So, Your previous experience matters. Julian Kaminsky then went on to look at what she called fast mapping in a dog I'm sure you've all heard about, Rico, he was very famous years ago. And Rico had the ability to go rescue any toy that his human gave a name to, and he had a huge number of toys that had labels.
And he went into the lab at the Max Planck Institute with his toys and his list of labels, and they found out by giving him a toy that he did not have a label for and asking him to get the other toys, and then this one. That he was able to realise, he knew the labels of all these other toys. This was an unfamiliar toy, he did not know the label.
It must be the one that matched the word he didn't know. OK. Now, that's a pretty important finding, and he was able to do it better than 9 times out of 10 in a highly statistically significant manner when they repeated this test multiple times.
So, what they found out was, and their conclusions are very clear. He has a set of simple mechanisms. He has the ability to acquire the principle that objects have labels.
He can learn by exclusion. In other words, emergent matching. I don't know the name of that one, and I don't recognise that one.
And there is a label here that I don't know. Therefore, this must be it, because I know everything else, and he could store that knowledge in memory. The reason this matters is that's a complex form of learning, and it's the first stage of human language acquisition.
So in addition to recognising dogs human signals when asked to do so and exposed to them, and being able to use the same signal to ask the humans for something, dogs can label things and fast map. In other words, learn from exclusion. OK.
They then went on to ask the question, how does the exposure affect attention and facial expressions? And they used a system that is used in humans, to label which area of the dog's face moves, which muscles move. And this is a system that is now being used in many species of animals.
You'll see this used in dogs, you'll see it used in horses. And they found out that raising the inner eyebrow. Depends on whether or not you're giving the dog attention, not whether or not food's involved.
And that means that the dog, when he raises the inner eyebrow, we're back to the subtleties of the tail only now it's the inner eyebrow. That means when the dog raises the inner eyebrow, that dog is keying in to the attention and responding back to that. So, here they're saying that human attentional state affects dog behaviours, so they're responding back to that.
Food did not affect this, and the production of dogs' facial expression is subject to audience effects. So tailoring their state to human attention. Is complex and means that they can both communicate their underlying emotional states and respond to the human's expectations about that.
OK. Now, what's going on in their brain when they do that? Well, Gregory Burns' lab at Emory University has taught dogs.
To lie still in an MRI unit so that they can ask them simple questions. Are you going to get a reward for this or are you not going to get a reward for this? So in this simple MRI with awake unrestrained dogs, the task here was to determine which brain surface circuits responded to human hand signals indicating the presence or absence of a reward.
So this is what they look like. This is in fact the, the test cradle. This is a wooden cradle, and this is what they look like in the apps in the actual MR unit and this is one of the assistants in the study.
So they teach them to do this in this, this cradle where they habituate them every weekend and teach them to do this and they've been taught that this means that there's a reward coming and crossed hands means there's no reward coming. So, when they signalled that there's a reward coming, the caudate nucleus, these are only two dogs. This is a study it only involved two dogs.
Lights up. So here's the caudate nucleus. So here's where reward is coming, and here's where no reward is coming for the two dogs.
And if you sum the two together, you see a clear difference in the caudate nucleus lighting up when they know that a reward is coming. So the caudate nucleus, which is a centre of dopamine activity, is somehow linked to the knowledge of a reward. Well, they followed that up and this is a very recent paper, 2016, at the end of 2016, where they had 15 dogs in MR and they use the caudate nucleus because now they know it's a measure of intrinsic reward.
And they asked the dogs which they preferred, praise. Or food. So there was a praise signal that the humans gave, and they had a fence test that backed up these data.
You could either have your human's instructions or you could have a treat. And they found out that 13 out of 15 dogs chose praise. Why?
Probably because it emphasises accurate information. And accurate information is one of the things dogs work for. And if you look at all of those studies summed up, they're all saying that dogs are using this complex communication system to get and exchange accurate information so that they work as part of that social unit with other dogs and with humans.
So, the poll question is an easy one. Why is attentional focus important in dogs? It varies with experience with humans, can be useful for interactions with dogs.
Indicators of accurate information activate reward centres in the brain, or both of the above matter, because Social information is important for social animals. So what does everybody think? So people are voting and I think most people seem to be guessing it, but we'll give people a little moment to continue to vote.
So. Just another couple of seconds just so that people can vote. I think these are questions late on overnight, but also early for some people.
Basically 12% saying B, indicators of accurate information activate reward centres in the brain, and then the majority, 85%, 15% B. 85% it's just changing, but it's both of the above matter and that's the answer because we've shown that experience matters so dogs may have something special, but also experience matters. OK.
I only have about 10 more minutes given when we started, so although there, although there are poll questions for the rest of this, I'm just gonna rattle through them and, and we'll skip them because I want to get to these last sets of constructs for you. So, how should we handle and train dogs given what we just learned about how dogs communicate and what does this mean for our aggressive patients? So again, the French group looked at training dogs with Positive rewards or no rewards.
And what they found out is if you took away rewards, Negative punishment, I'm sorry, negative rewards. You found out that most dogs exhibited a low body posture. If you gave Positive rewards.
In other words, you gave accurate information. Most dogs gaze towards the owner. So if you punish a dog or you don't give it a reward, you tend to see these body postures that are associated with drawing from the the social situation.
If you give them positive rewards, you see dogs gazing towards people for more information. So this even factors into our training. More dogs trained with negative reinforcement showed what they called signs of stress, and I want to point out to you that this is the low body posture that is used in those dominant studies.
And yet here they're calling that a sign of stress because they're withdrawing from that social interaction and they're they're not looking at people, whereas if you use positive rewards, they look at you for more information because that's a marker of accurate information. And there have been a couple of reviews that you should know about that came up recently. Ziv out of Israel reviewed all the papers on positive versus aversive training, and without exception, all of the aversive training methods seemed to show that, and they included positive punishment and negative reinforcement, that there was a risk to physical and mental health in dogs.
And a really fascinating paper has come out just recently, in fact, it's just out. Out of the University of Pennsylvania, Carlos Syracusa, who looked at which dogs were, they looked at which dogs were euthanized in a patient population. And not only were the people who used the aversive methods more likely to get bitten and more at risk, the same things you've found, the same thing everybody's found.
But the people who euthanize their dogs for behaviour problems had previously consulted a non-veterinary behaviourist or trainer who used punishment-based training. Two things there, punishment-based training increased the risk of euthanasia, and they consulted a non-specialist. And what happened here is that they delayed treatment and all of these conditions are time penetrant conditions.
So the take home message is, you don't wait, you run to the specialist with an aggression problem, and you don't use aversive methods, which is what we just said in the poll question. What about the source of the puppy? How does that factor into all of this?
Well, a group out of Italy has looked at owner reported problems in dogs separated from litters at two different ages. And they found out that dogs separated at 6 weeks. Compared to dogs separated at 8 weeks.
Were reported by the owners to have more destructiveness, barking, possessiveness of toys, fearfulness on walks, attention-seeking behaviour, aversion to strangers, and play biting, and they had odds ratios that were considerably higher for those things. And when they looked at the actual complaints, they had a statistically significant higher rate of reaction to noises and attention-seeking behaviours. So early separating of dogs from their litters is not recommended.
What about what happens in pet stores? Is there an effect of just being in a pet store? Well, if you look at licking the body, house soiling, owner-directed aggression complaints of any kind or separation related behaviours, dogs that were At the same age and obtained in a pet store versus left at a breeder where they could associate with other dogs, pet store dogs were far more at risk for all of these problems.
One of the problem is that when you're doing these types of studies, other things factor into this. So you really need very large sample sizes to get around all the other factors, but even when you consider those, nothing could overcome these odds ratios. Finally, Frank McMillan, who runs Best Friends Animal Rescue in the west of the United States, went and reviewed all the studies on early puppyhood and where the pups came from and how early they were separated, and sure enough, you're far more at risk.
Of behaviour problems, if you're separated early, if you're malnourished, if you're exposed to an abusive environment or a punishing environment, or if you're sold commercially, then in a competent breeder's household, which is interesting because and this is my only cat paper, but it is an open access one, in a very, very, very large, very large, almost 6000 people participating in this cat study. In this very large cat study, the people who did this, this is out of Hans Lois's group, Hannes Lois's group in Finland, found out that if you looked at these early weaned cats, cats who were weaned at 5 to 6 weeks of age versus cats who were allowed to hang around with their families to 14 to 15 weeks, early weaning in these cats was strongly associated in owner reports of aggression to strangers and other behaviour problems. So, There is a real reason to leave animals and allow them to go through the developmental phases that they would go through on their own because puppyhood is not blissfully short in these dogs.
It is not unimportant. In fact, it matters greatly and it's been understudied. OK.
Final issues. Should we assess every single dog and cat for behavioural concerns? Absolutely.
I'm gonna talk about an old paper of ours and a recent paper of ours, where we decided to assess every single dog that came into the behaviour clinic for their reactions to different types of noises, to being left alone, or the combination of the two, and we were stunned with what we found. We found that unless we asked the question, people didn't tell us if the dogs reacted to noises. And we also found out that dogs who had all three of these conditions, versus just a combination of them, were overrepresented in the patient population.
Furthermore, when they had all three problems, reaction to storms, reaction to fireworks, and separation anxiety, they were all much worse affected than any dog who had only a subset of the problems. So something about this combination of behaviours makes you worse. Well, in a recent set of studies we did, We found out that in fact, if you look at Australian shepherds, border collies and German shepherds, and I'm only gonna show you the, the data for the border collies and the Aussies right here.
If you look at storms, fireworks, and gunshots, the number of signs the dogs Exhibited was much higher for the border collies. The border collies were more severely affected than the Aussies. So they would tremble, they would pant, they would salivate.
And in fact, here are the data for what they did. So border collies, Aussies, and German shepherds, fireworks, storms, and guns. And Aussies and border collies are pretty similar, but the thing, and they, they most often.
Would tremble, they would pant, and they would hide. But if you take a look at what German shepherds do, German shepherds don't do that, German shepherds pace. So there are some differences in how different breeds of dogs may, and I say may because although study involved hundreds of dogs, it's small in the scope of dogs, may exhibit these behaviours.
We're still pursuing this noise issue, and this is a paper that also came out recently where we asked, do dogs that react to noise hear differently than dogs that don't react to noise? And we found out that dogs that were noise reactive, and we don't use the word sensitive because there's an audiologist, there are two audiologists on this project, and, to them, sensitive is about a level at which an animal can hear. So we took dogs that were a little uncomfortable in noises, dogs that were clearly afraid of noises.
And dogs that were clearly phobic grouped them all together as reactive, but we had a scaled way, standardised score where we could separate them out that I'm not going to discuss with you. But because there are two big startling findings from this study. Now, this is a small study and it needs to be replicated.
So it's got a lot of concerns and they're discussed in the paper. But when we looked at the group of dogs that were reacting to noises, And we looked at their Their right, wave 5 of an awake bear test, we got completely different results for dogs that didn't react to noise than dogs that did react to noise. In fact, they don't process the information the same in the right and left hemispheres of their brain.
We have no idea what this means. OK, we have no clue as to what this means yet, and we are hoping to find out. What concerned me even more though, was that these dogs were all screened to not have Any aggressive problems or any true fears.
They only had this noise problem and that's hard to find. We wanted them to be awake to do this test. Dogs who Had noise reactivity, statistically were overrepresented in the group of dogs who could not do this test.
They couldn't sit still. They couldn't let us touch them. They couldn't let us put the electrodes in, even though we'd numbed them up.
They couldn't let us provide the numbing cream. These dogs are reactive all the time, no matter what, and they are suffering even though they're not problematic for the owner. So something about how you react to noises in your environment is probably more important than we think about on a daily basis.
So what does this tell us about practises? For those of you who practise, you, you know, you've got animals coming in all the time. Well, Bjorn Forkman's group in Denmark has looked at this, and they've found out that people are pretty good at identifying painful circumstances in these dogs, but they're not good at identifying stressful or fearful circumstances.
Test leaders have one impression, everybody else has another. So, when they developed a standardised set of tests for assessing how upset a dog was in a clinic, which they now recommend that everybody do in addition to screening them for things like fears of noises. And fears of other things.
They found out that the dogs were less likely to play and take a treat inside the clinic than they were outside, suggesting that the dogs themselves. OK, how the dogs told them. Experience the inside of the clinic is more negative.
And together, their findings found that the examination itself may be experienced far more negatively than a waiting room environment. Or anything that followed the examination. Well, that supports the findings out of Germany on cardiac responses.
They standardised a nine-item test that looked at, how you touched the dog and what the cardiac results were, and they looked at vagal tone. So if behavioural measures of distress were absent, you have an increased vagal tone. And decreased cardiac measures.
And if the behaviour, behavioural measures of distress are present, you have a decreased vagal tone and increased heart measures. And sure enough, the only intervention that gave you the vagal tone direction you wanted was petting the dog on the chest. Everything else was considered a stress.
And if you reached around the dog and restrained the dog, the dog showed even higher signs of distress. If they were allowed to do some displacement activities, which is what's shown down here, they were less distressed. Now, I want you to remember what we talked about with where you touch animals.
It matters for these dogs. If it matters for humans, how you touch dogs matters. If they can't escape, if they feel that you are enclosing them, if you increase their vagal tone, they're distressed.
OK. So general conclusions here. I want you to realise that most of the work we still do in veterinary behavioural medicine is done with a survey and I've showed you a bunch of survey studies.
The basic science aspects are largely being done by PhDs and that's what you're seeing in these cardiac studies that look at at heart rate variability. And vagal tone. If you have increased vagal tone, you're less stressed.
If you have decreased vagal tone, you're more stressed. These are studies being done by physiologists and welfare people. They're not being done by veterinarians, so they're not getting into the veterinary literature.
And that's a problem for us. Don't overgeneralize, but realise that basic science has a real application for all of us. Don't cherry-pick the sexy findings that you're gonna find the popular press blasts pick up.
That's gonna affect that's gonna skew how you think of of these data. And when you do get a paper you're interested in, read it critically. Don't rely on an abstract.
Everybody can get abstracts for free and don't think that authors don't adjust their abstracts knowing that. Good editors don't let them do that, but it's very common. Check that the abstract and the data match, and then finally, remember that every study has drawbacks.
If the study says, here are the drawbacks, those people are probably being honest. So that was my whirlwind tour through hot findings and to help you look at the literature, you're always welcome to email me. I do answer my emails just not when most people want me to.
This is the journal, if you belong to any of these groups, you get a discount for the journal, and if you think you're really interested in this stuff, we offer a residential course at the North American Veterinary Conference Institute. Every May, where we throw you in the room with 3 specialists and throw in food from time to time for a week, and you get to have all these discussions and have lectures and have hands-on case slips. So I know it's horrendously late for most of you, and I just have to thank you for staying up and for being interested in something I'm passionate about.
And I hope this take is a new approach for most of you. Thank you so much, Karen, that was amazing. I do need to look over it again because .
My, my brain is fizzing at the moment, so it's overheating. There's a lot there. Well, it was deliberately a lot so people could go back, but it's very good because I think it's, you know, I listen to Sarah a lot when we're at the footy, and, Sarah, please come in.
I think I've just done muted you, . A lot of Mike Willard says it best, he says, a lot of what, what I taught you 10 years ago was a lie, I just didn't realise. And we do move on so quickly, don't we, and, and things change as we, as we just.
You know, as you say, you have the clever PhD students looking at this and really You know, doing evidence-based medicine rather than all, you know, the kind of pop psychology that we could perhaps. Do and that's popularised on the television and so on. Yeah, and I would just really like for veterinarians to have more access to these and when they're presented in sort of this digested encapsulated point and I hit all the main topics, knew I was going to exhaust everybody's brain because I knew they could go back to it.
I, I, I think that if you, if you realise that it's empowering, Yeah, definitely. Sarah, any thoughts? Sarah's probably asleep too.
The thing that I liked was that all of these studies that are beginning to look at, aggression and dog bites and signalling all back up everything Sarah said in that talk. Yeah, very much. And just while.
Sarah will be on in a second, I'm sure. Richard has just said to help us shape future virtual congresses, please let us know what you have enjoyed and what topics you would like to see in the future by completing the feedback form at the end of this webinar. Obviously for us, it, you know, we try and make this, you know, what you guys in practise want.
So it's great when we get feedback of whether we've got it right or wrong. So please do, you know, email me Anthony at the webinar vet.com.
If you found it, really helpful, you know, it's lovely to have some testimonials that we can get on our new site. If you've found it not so good, it's also good for us to know because we don't think that we'll get, we won't get better unless we, you know, we listen and we learn, so. We're very much into, to improving.
So, do, you know, help us out with those and do feel free to, send an email if, if you've, enjoyed or not enjoyed the conference. Sarah's saying I'm, I'm here, but I don't think you can hear me. Sarah, have you, have you pushed your mute button, because that's sometimes what I do in my excitement.
So check on your headset because you're probably, there you go, is that what you've done? Can you hear me now? Yes, I can.
How you, how do you press the mute button? I had, yes. We all do it.
So, what did you think of Karen's presentation? Yeah, great, Karen, thank you, really good overview of the literature. I don't think the literature's always daunting, for people who are not used to reading papers as well, so it's nice to just pick out pieces like you did there and, and so that people get a taste for what's out there in, in the.
In the literature. I think one of the things I'd really like to see is concentrating more on emotional states than behavioural signs, but I think we're, we're, you know, we're moving in the right direction. Yeah, I think people are beginning to have good measures of those, and that's the thing that I find exciting about so much of this imaging.
Because here's you know, here's a way we can quantify some of some of those findings and find out that, oh yeah, you know, if if everything's going in a positive direction, yeah, you light up a certain region of your brain so we can actually tell if you're getting that signal correctly, and, and you know I think that this is, this is just the beginning. But people are finally measuring things, they're realising there might be different ways, you know, now we can use cardiac technologies, we can use imaging technologies, we can use, use a lot of video, we can still look at at traditional behavioural studies, and I, I just think that it's there's a lot there and I think it's gonna start to philtre down clinically in a way that, that is potentially very useful. No, that was really good, and it's, it's fascinating some of the questions, coming out and, you know, as I said, with my conversations I have with Sarah, and we realised, you know, that some of the things we're not, we haven't been doing right.
Christine said, I can't help but feel what I've done all this time is wrong re dominance. Certainly worked for bouncy, strong dogs and obedience training, and I now teach all my clients to practise holding new dogs down, so get used to being handled, examined. So, Christine, are you a vet or a nurse, just perhaps filling those gaps, and I think.
You know, that, that's just fascinating to me because that's exactly why I put this in. Because now if you look at this and you take the cardiac factors and you take the behavioural factors. I guess we're gonna change some of those things, you know, instead of we can, we can invite dogs to be handled, we can teach them to be handled, and we're now recommending that everybody teach their dog how to go to the veterinarian, and we've got training club.
In the area where they teach the dogs to get on the scale, they teach the dogs to get on the table, they teach the dogs to lie down. My dogs are all taught to offer their legs for blood draws and to turn left or right for ultrasound and to hold their breath for a chest radiograph. You must have the best behaved dog in the world.
I don't. They were just all barking in the background. They're horrors.
They're absolute horrors, but they can go to the vets. They behave when the, when, when the, my mummy said I was an outside angel and inside devil, so maybe that's what you do as well. Well, I just realised that I could get blood in 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes if the dog was willing to do it with me, and the earlier we teach these things, the better, and part of it were those studies that showed me where dogs were distressed.
Louise asked a question which I think you both can, can answer and I know this is a fascinating one that I've been thinking about after all the advice that I gave during my career. Louise is saying, do you feel timing of castration is important in preventing repulsion problems due to the lust response? I'm particularly thinking of the wish, to castrate large breeds later, .
So, over to you with that question, either or, Karen or Sarah. Sorry, I didn't quite get that question. The, I heard about the responses.
I am particularly I think she, we had, and I think it was a webinar this week actually, which was all about, you know, large breed dogs. If you castrate them too early, you've got medical problems. So whether she's meaning that, but it's Louise, so if you want to.
Chip in with another comment. Do you feel timing of castration is important in preventing repulsion problems due to the lust response? I'm particularly thinking of, I think when she feels that castrating large breeds is appropriate, you know, whether we should do that later and whether that causes.
A conflict because of, you know, the dog maturing. I think that's what she's asking the, the big thing here, I think, is to remember that, repulsion related behaviour may be, may be due to things like frustrated lust, but it can be for many, many other reasons as well. And that if you're going to think about using, .
Neuting for control of any sort of behavioural issue, you need to be sure that it is a hormonally related emotional. And I, I appropriate. Yeah, I, I, no, no, I'm sorry.
I think that that's exactly it. And very few of these, these situations are actually that, . It's interesting because as part of their series of studies on health and neutering and dogs, Ben Hart at UC Davis has had a series of papers and plus one in a number of other journals, and they looked at the behavioural aspects and there have been no published data that have held up that have suggested that that's true.
So, you know, the vast majority of these problems are not related to hormones. There are huge other, there are any number of other reasons that this could be happening. And I think, you know, part of when Sarah and I have chatted, it, it, you know, obviously there is a blanket thing for castration, I think in America, also in the UK probably in other countries, I know it's less, but.
Obviously, as Sarah said, you've almost got to look at the dog and see the behaviour of the dog before you make that decision whether to castrate or not, because if you've got a nervous, fearful dog, castration is not gonna help that situation at all anyway, is it, and might hinder it, of course. Correct. And you know, an emotional before you consider neutering, and I think, as you just said, in the States and in the UK there's definitely a tendency to see neutering as a kind of almost a given that, you know, almost you just do, if you're not going to breathe them you castrate them or you or you neuter them and and that's certainly not the case in, for example, Scandinavian countries and.
So there is a cultural difference quite definitely, on, on our response to, nutrient. And what we need to be having, as, as Karen so nicely pointed out with her presentation, is, is that all of our approaches in, in veterinary medicine should be evidence-based, and, obviously we, we still have quite a long way to go to get evidence in a lot of areas, but we do have, we do have evidence in this area, so. I think it's important to to remember that actually neutering is not just, shouldn't be seen just as a, a blanket thing, it's certainly not a, you know, we do this at at X age in all individuals because it's more nuanced than that, isn't it, in, in all sorts of ways, not just behavioural.
So I think there is a tiny lag, so apologies, Karen, but we're having that little problem. Do you want to make a comment on that as well? Just to say that, you know, there are cultural differences and they're often driven by different things.
The, you know, Americans are notoriously careless with their dogs. We would never be able to do as the Scandinavians do and ensure that our dogs didn't get pregnant, and there are very careful Americans, but the neutering here, Really evolved because of, at one point, you know, we were killing millions and millions and millions of dogs every year that were unwanted, so we were careless compared to other groups, but I think people should, should think these things through and decide what's best for them, and the, the decisions may be made on the basis of all sorts of things. You know, if, if you're, worried about certain types of conditions, you know, if you can't bear to have a female who has a pyometra and you realise that 25% of all bitches with pyometra do die from it, and you can't, you cannot monitor that dog.
Neutering that dog, spaying that dog may be the right choice, and it's not all behavioural, but the data don't support this blanket. Everything's controlled by your hormones, sex hormones. I'm conscious with, you know, we are very late.
It is great people are staying on. I'm gonna ask people, we, we will have these, these recordings up because I do think, you know, and also they are available as a, audio, so you can listen to those on your phone, perhaps when you're driving around, just to keep on thinking about it. I'd ask you to put the questions that you've got.
Perhaps under the recording, and then we can ask Karen and Sarah to perhaps join in that conversation, because I think there is some really good stuff here. I mean, the questions we've got Gay there asking, do you believe once a bite or always a biter, Danielle's saying, so what do I do if I see all the signs in the dog that I'm examining, you know, that it, that it's, looks like it's gonna do something. Do I stop the interaction altogether or wait a while, or just, you know, get on with it.
So there's a lot of interesting questions there, but I think they're going to take a while to answer. But let's have Gayle's question because, do you believe once a biter, always a biter and perhaps ask Sarah first and then Karen for her opinion on that. The short answer to that is no.
But, but, but I thought you might say that. It's an awful lot longer, but no, absolutely, absolutely not, and I think, yeah, otherwise we don't, we can't believe in any form of rehabilitation of emotional reactions and, and that most certainly is not our experience and, and no, I, I don't believe that. But I think you have to then think about, well, what was the motivation for it in that particular incident.
What was the context? Is that something that's, that's adjustable, and there's, there's two ways of looking at it because is, is it that we could actually prevent that from happening again just because we're changing the circumstances that I was talking about having textual labels and victim labels. Or is it because we actually can work out the emotional motivation and alter the animal's perception of the environment.
So yeah, it's very, very complicated, but, but, but the very, very simple answer to the question is no. And Karen, I, I presume you're gonna agree with Sarah on that one. Absolutely.
In fact, the, the video that is shown here, the Humane behavioural Care for Dogs video, has a dog that I took after he, it was one of my patients, and I took him after he'd severely injured a number of people and he became the rock star of the dog world, which isn't to say people should take and adopt aggressive dogs, but it is to say that, We all change, neurochemical states can change. What scares us can change. Learning changes.
Learning is the process of changing behaviour. So, And circumstances and presumably environment can change as well, yeah. Everything, and the same is true for cats, you know, people say, oh, the cat sprays, they're not getting along with the other cat.
Well, the easiest solution for that, believe it or not, put the cat in another home 9 times out of 10, it stops. And guess what? The other thing is that the same is true for human animals as well as non-human ones.
Presumably it's a bit like saying . You know, once the dog starts itching, it's always gonna itch, you know, we as, as dermatologists and behaviourists hopefully can do something about that with our. With our medicine.
So a great question, Gayle, because obviously it's, it's good to bring that out. I think there's been some super questions. We haven't got around to them all.
I do apologise for that. Do stick them up underneath the recordings. Let's get the conversation going there and then I'll, I'll try and twist Sarah and Karen's arm to perhaps go over and have a little look at those and add a few comments.
I'm happy to do that. I, I think just, you know, going back over that webinar again, there was both of them, there was so much information, and I know speaking to Sarah, I get challenged on, on, you know, a lot of behavioural things, which I think is really good. So, .
Karen, Sarah, thank you so much, particularly Sarah, cos it is the technical. Well, I was gonna say it is midnight, Sarah. I mean, Karen's got it slightly easier.
It is. He's OK. So I, you know, I do, I do thank you very much, Sarah, for coming on so late, but you've had people staying on, so fantastic from both of you.
I really enjoyed it. I definitely will revisit this one again, put some comments into the recordings. They should be up midweek, I suspect.
We'll try and get them up a bit earlier, but we'll, you know, we'll let people know when they're coming up. But just thanks everyone.