Companion Animal Psychology

The lessons we can learn from a study of homeless cats in Australia. Photo: joyfuldesigns/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. Although there are many un-owned cats , surprisingly little is known about the cats taken in by shelters and rescues. Without this information, it is difficult to design strategies to tackle the problem. A study in the Australian Journal of Veterinary Medicine by Alberthsson et al investigates the source and characteristics of cats admitted to RSPCA shelters in Queensland from July 2006 to June 2008. All eleven RSPCA shelters in Queensland took part. During this time period, a total of 33,736 cats were admitted. Of these, 54% were kittens, defined as three months or under. The source of the cats was defined as brought in by a person, which included owner surrenders and cats that people had found as strays, or brought in by a member of st

Photo: Sofya Apkalikova/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. An assessment of how parents behave when an unknown dog is near their child shows much still needs to be done to prevent dog bites in children. Children are at greater risk of dog bites than adults. The Canada Safety Council estimates that 460,000 Canadians are bitten by dogs every year, of whom 75% are children under the age of ten. If bitten, children are more likely than adults to be hospitalized because of their small size and the closeness of their face to a dog’s mouth.  The Blue Dog Project was designed to increase children’s knowledge about dogs and alter the behaviour of both children and their parents. While earlier studies show it successfully increases children’s knowledge, little is known about whether parents are more cautious around dogs as a result. Barbara Morrongiello (University of

What happens when cats and coyotes inhabit the same area? Photo: taviphoto/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. In parts of north America, some people keep their cats indoors because of the risk of predation by coyotes. Outdoors cats must co-exist with them, if they can. Yet very little is known about the risk to cats from coyotes, and the extent to which populations overlap. A fascinating study of free-roaming cats in Chicago (Gehrt et al 2013) provides answers to these questions. Chicago is one of the largest cities in north America with a human population of over 8 million. The study took place from 2008 to 2010 at various locations in the northwestern suburbs, including public parks, conservation areas, and a private wildlife reserve. The research team were already collecting data on coyotes in this area, making it the perfect location for a study of how cats m

Photo: bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock Do people choose a breed of dog for its personality, looks, health, or fashion? By Zazie Todd, PhD This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. There are so many breeds of dog, it can be hard to choose which one you'd like most. Some are always popular, while other breeds rise or fall in popularity.  A new study by Stefano Ghirlanda et al 2013 investigates whether changes in the most popular breeds over the years reflect personality characteristics, health, or fashion. We think of different breeds as having different temperaments, such as the “ friendly and gentle, but also alert and outgoing ” Siberian Husky, the “ alert, lively, active, keen ” Russell Terrier “with a very intelligent expression,” or the “ calm, confident and courageous ” Rottweiler. The first question the scientists asked was, is this true? For their answer, they turned to the C-BARQ, a standard

Do babies and dogs process facial expressions in the same way, and if so what does it tell us about the evolution of emotion? By Zazie Todd, PhD This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. Darwin suggested that some human emotional expressions could have their origins in the facial expressions of other animals, including primates and dogs. If so, there would be similarities in the way people process emotional faces across these different species. While most research has focussed on other primates, a paper just published in PLoS One by Annett Schirmer et al (National University of Singapore) investigates whether or not there are similarities in processing facial expressions in human infants and dogs. The study asked sixty-four participants, half of whom were dog-owners, to take part in a series of tests. The experiment included both implicit and explicit tests of emotional processing. The explicit tests asked

Can dogs tell how much food there is just by using their nose? By Zazie Todd, PhD This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. We all know dogs’ noses are amazing. From careful attention to the pee-points on their walk, to working as drug or explosive detection dogs, it’s clear dogs have an excellent sense of smell. So it’s surprising that most studies of olfaction are about specially trained dogs, and less attention has been paid to the average pet dog. A paper in press in the journal Learning and Motivation , by Alexandra Horowitz, Julie Hecht and Alexandra Dedrick, sets out to change all that by asking, can dogs smell whether a closed plate contains a small or large quantity of food? The research is based on a study of canine preferences by Prato-Previde et al in 2008. They found that when dogs could see two plates, one with a small amount of food and the other with a large amount of food, they preferr

By Zazie Todd, PhD This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. One time when I took my dog for a walk, someone was playing with a radio-controlled car on the road. This was Very Exciting (actually most things in life are Very Exciting!). I asked him to heel as we walked past it, but he would have preferred to investigate the car. How do dogs interact with things like this, and does it change if the object moves in an apparently social way? Robots have been used in studies with various species as a way of experimentally testing the rules of communication. Perhaps the most interesting for dog lovers is Leaver and Reimchen’s (2008) study in which off-leash dogs interacted with a dog-like robot with one of four different possible tails: short and still, short and wagging, long and still, or long and wagging. With the long tail, dogs were more likely to approach if it was wagging rather than still, but there was n