ETHOLOGY AND CANINE BEHAVIOUR SERIES

June 5, 2013
Speaker: Beth Duman, CPDT-KA
Your Dog is a Wolf, but it’s Not!! ….a Day without Pee is a Day without Sunshine! 
Wolf behavior – how it relates to training dogs is the question at the core of understanding where dogs came from and how they developed from a wild animal to our household pet. We all know through recent genetic analysis that our dog’s ancestors were wolves. How do we use this information to better work with and understand our canine companions? Biologist and trainer, Beth Duman, CPDT-KA, VSPDT will guide you through a lively discussion of wolf behavior and ecology and how this relates to our training methods and interactions with our pet dogs. Cost: $25.00

July 17, 2013
Science and the Shelter Dog: How Do We Improve Adoption?
Speaker: Alexandra (Sasha) Protopopova, MS, CPDT-KA
With the numerous amounts of training and behavior modification programs out there designed to improve shelter dog adoptions, how do we know which ones to implement at our shelter? Discover what science can tell us. How do people choose dogs? What do adopters prefer dogs to look and act like at the shelter? What about breed-specific training programs? Learn about past scientific studies that have assessed training programs at shelters as well as learn more about our on-going research at the University of Florida on adopter preferences, assessment of current training protocols, as well as our plans for future research that will finally develop a validated, efficient, and effective training program to improve welfare and adoption success of shelter dogs.

August 7, 2013 -
(TBA: From Argentina- studies social behavior and learning in foxes, wolves, and dogs)
Speaker: Dr. Mariana Bentosela, Ph.D.

September 4, 2013
Dog Cognition: A Report from Kyoto
Speaker: Dr. Kazuo Fujita
In this talk, Dr. Fujita will present studies on various cognitive functions in dogs conducted as an activity of CAMP-WAN, Companion Animal Mind Project – Wide Area Network, Kyoto University (see https://sites.google.com/site/kyotocampwan2/home — Japanese website). Topics include: episodic use of incidentally formed memory, multimodal recognition of owners and genders, understanding of social characteristics of humans, inference of physical environment from social information, and behavioral characteristics related to genetic variations. We find wonderful intelligence and behavioral flexibility of dogs in many of the tests but at the same time limitations of their cognitive abilities.

October 2, 2013
Talk Title: TBA
Speaker:  Trish McMillan Loehr MSc, CPDT-KA