Fun on the Farm

The Education Department has two seasons -- the school year and camp.  While we have already started our summer camp sessions,  I wanted to recap some recent adventures from our school year. 

The first was our Critter Club's recent field trip to Heartland Farm Sanctuary.   This was our club's second visit, the first being a year ago.  Many of the kids were new to Critter Club and this was their first visit.  The kids who had already been on the field trip were thrilled to be able to go again since they loved the experience so much the first time. 

The year the weather was much better and the kids had a great experience helping out with farm work.  They cleaned chicken coops, cleared manure from the goat pen, mucked out some stalls, and made sure that animals had food and water.  We left the farm that afternoon tired, happy, and feeling good about contributing our time to helping needy animals. 

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The next story is about a program I started at Saratoga STEM Academy in Waukesha.  Based on my success with working with kids from Hadfield Elementary during spring break camp and having them do a canine cognition study, I decided to see if I could get a similar program going at a middle school.  A STEM school seemed like the perfect place to implement such a program.  Luckily the staff at Saratoga agreed with me and were really excited about a collaboration.

My program ran during the Connect Session at the school over a period of 10 weeks.  Connect is the hour during lunch in which kids have options to engage in different activities, programs, or just do homework.   Ten students were interested in learning about dog cognition and enrolled in the program. 

During the course of the session I showed a lot of videos on cognition studies being done with various species of animals, talked about the difficulties that a person runs into with animals such as the "Clever Hans Effect", and had the kids come up with their own study to be implemented at HAWS. 

The study they came up with was a variation of the Social Eavesdropping study in which a dog observes someone begging for food from two individuals -- one of whom is generous and gives the dog food, and the other a selfish person who says "No".  The dog is then released to see which of the two individuals he approaches. 

The Saratoga group put an interesting twist on it.  They decided to see if the dog was more or less likely to go to the owner if the selfish person was the owner of the dog, rather than a stranger. 

While the sample size was only 11 dogs, the majority of the dogs did go to their owners rather than to the generous person.  The kids came to the conclusion that social interaction was more important to dogs than the opportunity to obtain a treat. 

I was really proud of the work they did on this project, and especially proud at their conclusion of the data.  I'm hopeful that I'll be able to do the program at Saratoga again next year, and perhaps even expand it to other schools in Waukesha County. 

Eavesdropping isn't Always Bad

Fifteen 4th and 5th graders, an emphasis on science, and a week at HAWS = HAWS annual Spring Break Camp.  This year's camp was made possible due to the generosity of an Arrowhead High School's DECA donation which covered all of our expenses and enabled HAWS to offer 4 days of camp free to Hadfield Elementary Boys and Girls Clubs. 

Last year I blogged about the adventures of the 2011 Spring Break Camp.  This year, as in last year, the kids had an opportunity to observe our veterinary staff in action, spend a lot of time with animals, and put together an experiment.  This year's experiment was based on an actual study on "Social Eavesdropping in the Domestic Dog" (Marshall-Pescini et al. 2011. Social eavesdropping in the domestic dog. Animal Behaviour (2011), doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.02.029).   Julie Hecht, MSc is a researcher of canine cognition and was kind enough to suggest this as a study might interest the kids -- and she was right since the kids really had a good time with it!

Social eavesdropping involves an individual watching interactions between other individuals.  In some cases it can provide information that will benefit someone in a decision making process.  In the social eavesdropping study the dog observes a person begging for food from two different people -- one of whom is generous and hands out food, and the other is selfish and refuses.  The dog is then released to see if he's learned which of the two individuals is more likely to give him food.  

The original study consisted of 100 dogs and found that most dogs went to the generous person after eavesdropping on the interactions between the beggar and the two individuals with food.   Our goal with the kids wasn't to replicate the study and have it pass a scientific peer review, but to teach the kids about how experiments are conducted, and show them that science can be fun.  For our purpose we only used eight dogs, and the goal was to find out if age made a difference in being able to socially eavesdrop. 

The kids really enjoyed the experiment and I was very proud of how much effort they put into it.  And while good experiments only have one variable, we had to work with the dogs that were available and there ended up being two.  The dogs two years and younger were shelter dogs, and the dogs three years of age and older were staff owned dogs.

I didn't think the kids would notice that discrepancy, and was initially dismayed when one of the girls pointed out that this could be a factor in why the older dogs were better at social eavesdropping than the younger dogs -- that having owners could have made a difference.  But when I thought about it a little longer it made me proud that at least one of the kids took in the information about keeping all the aspects of an experiment constant except for one variable, and that she was perceptive enough to notice we hadn't done that. 

Here's video of the experiment with the kids talking about it.