trixtah | Entries tagged with nanimals

The CDL has linked to an excellent paper by the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior, which specifically deprecates dominance theory when it comes to animal behaviour modification (ie. pet training).

Despite the fact that advances in behavior research have modified our understanding of social hierarchies in wolves, many animal trainers continue to base their training methods on outdated perceptions of dominance theory.
Dominance is defined as a relationship between individual animals that is established by force/aggression and submission to determine who has priority access to multiple resources such as food, preferred resting spots, and mates. Most undesirable behaviors in our pets are not related to priority access to resources; rather, they are due to accidentalrewarding of the undesirable behavior.
[In humans] Coercion and force generate passive resistance, tend to require continual pressure and direction from the leader, and are usually not good tactics for getting the best performance from a team. Additionally, those managers who rule through coercive power (the ability to punish) “most often generate resistance which may lead workers to deliberately avoid carrying out instructions or to disobey orders”.
Leadership is established when a pet owner can consistently set clear limits for behavior and effectively communicate the rules by immediately rewarding the correct behaviors and preventing access to or removing the rewards for
undesirable behaviors before these undesirable behaviors are reinforced. Owners must avoid reinforcing undesirable behaviors and only reinforce the desirable behaviors frequently enough and consistently enough for the good behaviors to become a habit. [easier said than done, of course!]

The paper debunks many of the statements made about dominance behaviour of animals in the wild, and makes the very valuable observation that dogs are not wolves. It also has a few descriptions of behaviour that is often labelled as "dominance" (such as a dog jumping on your lap), and provides appropriate explanations and some workarounds (hello, attention-seeking is not the same as dominance).

It's definitely worth a read, and some parallels might also be drawn with other mammals you might be surrounded by, even if you don't have dogs.

Owner of pit bull clones once manacled a Mormon for sex

It's about that stupid woman who cloned her dog and has 5 "identical" puppies (because a dog's personality is entirely made up of its genetics, of course). It turns out she has a past:

A Mormon missionary from Utah called Kirk Anderson, who was going door-to-door in Ewell, Surrey, was kidnapped at gunpoint by McKinney, a former cheerleader and beauty queen from North Carolina. With the help of a friend, Keith May, McKinney drugged Anderson with chloroform and drove him to a rented 17th century cottage near Okehampton, Devon. There the unfortunate young man was chained, spreadeagled, to a bed, with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs, and over the next few days he was repeatedly required to have sex with McKinney, who later explained that she had been keen to bear his child.

(She knew him before, apparently. She didn't kidnap him from her doorstep!) I thought the mink-lined cuffs were a nice touch, but, hey, I've had sex with a Mormon without any need of manacling.

After their arrest, she and her compatriot were released on bail and "fled to Canada disguised as mime artists" (my emphasis).

In more recent years, she broke into a pound to rescue a pitbull that was going to be put down for mauling a couple of people. She explained:

"I love those pit bulls. They're such sympathetic animals - they're my kind of dog."

Here's hoping she was talking about pit bulls in general, not so much the mauly kind. Although it's kind of hard to tell.

Current Mood: amused

While

saluqi's pooches are tooooo cute for words, it becomes slightly disturbing when they text you, as they did last week. This is what they had to say: