Companion Animal Psychology

The Pawsitive Post in Conversation with special guest Erica Beckwith of A Matter of Manners Dog Training. By Zazie Todd PhD Teaching tricks to your dog is fun and cute, and a great way to improve the human-animal bond. Plus, you get to show off how adorable your pet is. This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. Watch Episode 6 of The Pawsitive Post in Conversation on Youtube or below.  Please subscribe to Companion Animal Psychology's Youtube channel to make sure you don't miss future videos. Training Tricks with Your Dog (and Cat) Erica Beckwith is the talented tricks trainer behind A Matter of Manners Dog Training , where she does behaviour consults for dogs and cats and runs online classes to teach a variety of tricks including peekaboo, sit pretty, chorus line kicks, and how to take a selfie with your dog.  Kristi Benson and I spoke to Erica about why she loves teaching tricks, where she finds the mot...

Can you recognize these reward-based dog training books by the colours used on their covers? By Zazie Todd PhD This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. If you're like me, you've read a lot of dog books over the years. Even if you haven't, many dog guardians rely on some of the classic books to get information about dog training. So most people are familiar with at least some dog training books. But can you spot these popular books by the colours used on their cover? I got this idea from a post on Book Riot that asked if you can guess a classic book by its colour palette . But in this case, I'm sticking to dog training books.   I've turned the books' colour palette into stripes. There's a hint of the book covers peeking out from behind the stripes to give you a clue, but I've blocked out most of each cover. Some of the books have several different covers, depending on the edition, i...

A new post on my Psych Today blog about the things that shouldn't be done to cats. Photo: Dominika Roseclay/Pexels By Zazie Todd PhD Cats are wonderful pets, and dedicated cat guardians will do anything they can for their cats because they know that cats deserve to be happy. But there are still some misconceptions about what pet cats need. So today on my Psychology Today blog Fellow Creatures , I've got a post about 10 things you shouldn't do to your cat .

International Cat Care hosted an expert panel to answer your cat questions. Photo: Natalia Mikulich/Shutterstock By Zazie Todd PhD The 8th August is International Cat Day. The day is hosted by International Cat Care , an amazing charity who you should be following on social media if you care about owned or unowned cats. I was honoured to be part of their Expert Panel which answered viewers’ questions about cats. The discussion was chaired by Dr. Sarah Ellis of International Cat Care and broadcast live on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube. You can watch the recording on Youtube . International Cat Care put together an incredible selection of resources for International Cat Day and their infographics have been translated into several languages. Check out their cat friendly resources for #International Cat Day on their website and #BeCatCurious.  

“Lucy Cooke is brilliant, pedigreed, fearless, and flat-out hilarious . . . Bitch is astonishing, wildly entertaining, and massively important.”―Mary Roach By Zazie Todd PhD This month, the Animal Book Club is reading Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke. From the publisher, “Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.   Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.   In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where...

We already know that dogs have amazing noses, but it seems they can also use magnetoreception to help them find their way.  Photo: dezy/Shutterstock By Zazie Todd PhD This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. Every now and then, there’s a story of a dog finding their way back home from somewhere a long distance away. Of course scent is very important to dogs, so following a familiar smell is one way they might find their way back to family and home. But are there other ways too? Is it possible that dogs can detect magnetic fields and use them to find their way? It’s not a completely out-there idea, because birds are thought to use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate during long migrations. And several types of mammal—including red foxes, roe deer, and cattle—are thought to be able to detect magnetic fields. There’s some evidence from mammals’ eyes. A type of light receptor, called cryptochrome 1, is thought ...