Track your dog – TAGG

A great product that I feel comfortable endorsing on the website. I have had Tagg pet trackers for my 2 dogs for several months. This is great if you are concerned about your dog when you are not at home, or when you go out and if he tends to wander. Also, I can imagine this would make you feel more comfortable if you were on vacation and you wanted to check on your dog at home, or if your dog was accompanying you and got away.

The small tracker attaches to your dogs collar. It sends a signal by GPS and overlays that with a Google earth map to locate your dog at any time. If you have an Android phone there is an App that will show the place your dog is at any time. Also, you don’t even need a cell phone to use the tracker, you can log in to check on your dog from any computer. Continue reading Track your dog – TAGG

Marines need feedback : deployment with IDD’s

For Immediate Release: Jan. 19, 2012
By Katherine H. Crawford, Office of Naval Research
Specialty canines were on a mission to sniff out trouble and display their explosive-detecting abilities Jan. 18 as part of an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-hosted “Top Dog Demo 2012.”
“These dogs have kept Marines alive by helping them move through the battle space,” said Lisa Albuquerque, program manager for ONR’s Naval Expeditionary Dog Program, part of ONR’s Expeditionary Warfare and Combating Terrorism Department. “Marines can focus on their mission because they’ve got these four-legged sensors helping to keep them safe.” Continue reading Marines need feedback : deployment with IDD’s

Behaviours in dogs separated from litter at different ages

Prevalence of owner-reported behaviours in dogs separated from the litter at two different ages

  1. L. Pierantoni, DVM1,M. Albertini, DVM, PhD2 andF. Pirrone, DVM, PhD2

The present study examined the prevalence of behaviours in dogs separated from the litter for adoption at different ages. Seventy adult dogs separated from their dam and littermates and adopted between the ages of 30 and 40 days were compared with 70 adult dogs that had been taken from the litter for adoption at two months. Owners were asked to complete a questionnaire eliciting information on whether their dog exhibited potentially problematic behaviours when in its usual environment. Continue reading Behaviours in dogs separated from litter at different ages

How Dogs Think And Learn About Human Behavior

Can dogs read our minds? How do they learn to beg for food or behave badly primarily when we’re not looking? According to Monique Udell and her team, from the University of Florida in the US, the way that dogs come to respond to the level of people’s attentiveness tells us something about the ways dogs think and learn about human behavior. Continue reading How Dogs Think And Learn About Human Behavior

Dogs can learn object names

Some Dogs May Understand That Our Sounds Refer To Particular Objects: Border Collie Comprehends Over 1,000 Object Names
08 Jan 2011

Researchers at Wofford College discovered that a Border Collie comprehends the names of over 1000 objects, differentiating between names of objects and orders to fetch them. This research deepens the findings of researchers in Germany, who had discovered a dog that knew the names of a couple of hundred objects. Important questions were left open as to how far a dog could go, and whether the dog really understood that the object names were nouns and not commands to retrieve the object. Medical News Today

John Pilley and Alliston Reid answered two central questions with their research: How large can a dog’s vocabulary become if given extensive training? What do dogs actually understand when we use human language to communicate with them? These findings are published in the Elsevier journal Behavioural Processes.

The authors demonstrated that their dog, Chaser, learned the names of 1022 objects – no upper limit is apparent – they stopped training the dog after three years due to their time constraints, not because the dog could not learn more names. This study demonstrates Chaser’s ability to learn the names of proper nouns, and her extensive vocabulary was tested repeatedly under carefully controlled conditions. The authors admitted that she remembered the names of each of her 1022 toys better than they could, if you want to check the sort of toys approved for a dog, visit this website. Chaser’s ability to learn and remember more than 1000 proper nouns, each mapped to a unique object, revealed clear evidence of several capacities necessary for learning receptive human language: the ability to discriminate between 1022 different sounds representing names of objects, the ability to discriminate many objects visually, an extensive vocabulary, and a substantial memory system that allowed the mapping of many auditory stimuli to many visual stimuli.

Their second experiment demonstrated that Chaser really understands that these are names, and not commands to fetch the object. In order to test independence of meaning of nouns and commands, the authors randomly combined nouns with commands to see if Chaser would produce the correct behavior toward the correct object in each trial. Without special training, Chaser responded to each combination correctly, even on the first trial, demonstrating that Chaser understood that the commands and proper-noun names had independent meanings. The dog understands that names refer to particular objects, independent of the action requested involving that object.

Their third experiment demonstrated that the dog also understands names for categories of objects or common nouns, and not just individual names or proper nouns. For instance, she learned that name “toy” referred to the 1022 objects she was allowed to play with, each with a proper-noun name. By forming categories represented by common nouns, Chaser mapped one label onto many objects. Chaser also demonstrated that she could map up to three labels onto the same object without error. For example, Chaser knew the proper-noun names of all objects used in the research. Chaser also mapped the common noun “toy” onto these same objects. Her additional success with the two common nouns “ball” and “frisbee” demonstrates that she mapped a third label onto these objects. Her demonstrations of one-to-many and many-to-one noun/object mappings reveal flexibility in the referential nature of words in border collies.

Each of these experiments showed that the dog could learn names using procedures involving associative learning. Their fourth experiment demonstrated that Chaser could also learn names by exclusion – inferred the name of a novel object by exclusion of familiar already-named objects. Retention of these names using this procedure was limited to short periods, however, just as usually observed with children.

According to Alliston Reid, “This research is important because it demonstrates that dogs, like children, can develop extensive vocabularies and understand that certain words represent individual objects and other words represent categories of objects, independent in meaning of what one is asked to do with those objects.”

Additional research is needed to determine whether these impressive language abilities are shared by other breeds of dogs. This work encourages research into how the historical relationships between humans and dogs may have influenced the abilities of dogs to communicate with humans, and whether this influence is unique to dogs.

Notes:
“Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents” by John Pilley and Alliston Reid. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2010.11.007

About the authors
John W. Pilley, Ph.D. is a retired professor of psychology at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, where this study was completed.

Alliston K. Reid, Ph.D. is Reeves Family Professor of Psychology at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and currently serves as president of the Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior.
Source: Francesca Webb …Elsevier
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/213040.php

“Deed Not Breed” In Dangerous Dogs

Overwhelming Support For Deed Not Breed In Dangerous Dogs Consultation, UK

26 Nov 2010

The government has published the results of the Defra consultation on dangerous dogs revealing overwhelming support for an overhaul of the failed Dangerous Dogs Act 1991.

The consultation closed in June and the British Veterinary Association (BVA) and British Small Animal Veterinary Association (BSAVA) submitted a joint response based on sound scientific evidence and expert veterinary opinion. The response called for an end to breed-specific legislation that targets dogs based on the way they look rather than their actions. Continue reading “Deed Not Breed” In Dangerous Dogs