Fellow Creatures: 3 Things Dog and Cat Guardians Get Right
I've got a new post on my Psych Today blog, Fellow Creatures, which takes a look at the positive side of the pet-guardian relationship.
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| Photo: Valeria Boltneva/Pexels |
By Zazie Todd PhD
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The post is in response to one by Dr. Marc Bekoff ("Are you being fair to right-minded dog owners?") in which he writes about some comments he got from readers, and analyzes posts by himself and other Psych Today bloggers (including me!) to see if they tend towards the more negative or more positive end of things.
Because of that, I decided to take a look at 3 things that dog and cat guardians get right.
Dr. Bekoff's post also prompted me to look at some of my own posts, because I try hard to write positive posts most of the time, I had just written one that could be classed as more negative, and which is already one of my most-viewed posts on Psych Today. Maybe this tells us something about social media?
So for the record, right now I've got two Psych Today posts that are currently my most popular and that are practically neck-and-neck in terms of page views:
I've written several posts about how we can effectively communicate about dog training and dog and cat behaviour. Sharing positive recommendations is an important part of it. If you're interested to learn more, you might like these posts in particular:
- Reasons for hope in dog training and animal behaviour is about how the job of a writer is to bring hope to people (in many ways this is a nice answer to Dr. Bekoff's post, too).
- Why don't more people use positive reinforcement to train dogs? is a summary of my own research paper on the barriers to the adoption of humane dog training methods.
- Reasons to be positive about being positive in dog training looks at the best ways to counter misinformation, based on science.
- To promote positive reinforcement dog training, teach, engage, and amplify. If you want a summary of the best approaches to take when talking about dog training, this is the place to start. It's important to note that these same principles also apply to talking about how to care for cats, too.
And finally I'll add that if you're looking for positive suggestions for how to care for your dog or cat, you'll find plenty, including a checklist for a happy dog/cat, in my books Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy and Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy. If you're working with clients, I think you'll find these books very helpful as recommended reading.
