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. 

Domestication

In 1959 the fur industry in Russia tried to find a solution to the problem of difficult to handle wild foxes being raised for their fur. Soviet geneticist Dmitri Belyaev was enlisted to help with the problem and started a very well known experiment to domesticate the fox. Belyaev felt that the key to domestication was selection for tameness.

Fifty years later Belyaev's experiment is still on-going. Foxes today are 35 generations removed from the original foxes in the study -- with only the tamest foxes being bred. One of the most interesting effects of selecting ONLY for temperament has been the changes in the domesticated foxes physical appearance. Coats developed a piebald appearance, tails shortened and in some cases curled, and ears flopped instead of sticking straight up.

This is significant since it indicates that the diversity in appearance of our domestic dog could have originally developed as a result of selection for behavior. While in modern times dog fanciers select for appearance, long ago dogs were bred for function, and the ear carriage, coat color and length would have been a much smaller, if not irrelevant consideration.

True domestication is the result of animals being bred over many generations in such a way that they have been genetically altered to not only appear different than their wild counterparts -- but to be much more tractable than them. This differs from tameness -- which merely means that an animal has been raised in such a way that makes it easier to handle than it's wild relatives, however it has not necessarily been genetically changed and still retains it's wild behaviors, instincts and appearances.

Roy Horn of the duo Siegfried and Roy was seriously injured when he was bitten in the neck by a 7 year old tiger he'd raised from a cub that was part of his Las Vegas act. While the tiger had a relationship with Horn, it was still a wild animal.

Recently Belyaev's foxes have offered for sale in the United States through a distributor in Las Vegas, NV called Sibfox. For only $5,950 a person can have their own domesticated fox transported from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Russia.

While these foxes truly are domesticated animals, I have a problem with this for many reasons. First of all -- not much is known about keeping a fox as a pet. We don't know what their natural behavior is, nor do we know if a rabies vaccination developed for dogs is effective for foxes. The website states that there are very few fox owners out there, and so not many people have yet experienced them as pets.

This brings me to the next problem. On Sibfoxes FAQ page it states: "...none of our clients expressed interest in sharing their contact information with the public for any purpose. However, we can e-mail questions that you may have to them and determine whether they want to respond by email or telephone." So a potential purchaser does not have an opportunity to directly contact a current fox owner to ask questions.

The FAQ section also indicates that a prospective buyer has no opportunity to meet the fox they are purchasing prior to purchase, much less meet it's parents. Animal welfare professionals recommend that when purchasing an animal from a breeder the parents be met since the parents behavior is indicitive of what the temperament of it's offspring will have.

While I'm fascinated by the research results of Belyaev's foxes, I am very unhappy about having even domesticated foxes become pets. While the FAQ section indicated that all foxes will be neutered before being shipped to the United States (most likely as a way for them to remain the only source of the domestic fox pet trade), I see no reason for a new canid to become pets -- after we are very familiar with the behavior and care of dogs. And there are so many of them out there in need of a home.

Whatever Happened to Little Albert?

I'm doing a semester-long project with a group of boys from Lad Lake -- a non-profit organization that provides services to at-risk youth. Twice a week five boys from their Day Education Program come to HAWS to learn about dog behavior, training and other topics and actually do some hands on work with our adoptable dogs.

Part of the program involves a 15 or 20 minute presentation - a different topic each visit. Currently I'm working on a presentation on Classical Conditioning. Classical Conditioning involves a stimulus of an involuntary behavior with an stimulus that wouldn't normally cause that involuntary behavior. An example would be if a dog is terrified of loud noises. Initially he's afraid during storms when he hears thunder, but after a while becomes afraid when he sees lightning, because lightning predicts thunder.

While surfing the web and doing my research I came across the story of "Little Albert". If you took Psychology 101 you might remember this experiment done by John B. Watson in 1920. Watson wanted to show that humans are a product of their environment, NOT of their genetics.

It truly was a horrible experiment -- and it shows how little scientists back then cared for their subjects, and how poor ethical standards were at the time. His experiment consisted of exposing a 9 month old child named Albert to a variety of animals, towards which the child was not fearful. Watson then exposed the child to a white rat, and paired it with a loud clanging noise. Albert WAS afraid of the noise. After a while Albert became afraid of the rat, even when the noise wasn't present. Furthermore, he generalized it to ALL furry animals.

Unfortunately for Albert, he was removed from the study before Watson could attempt reverse his fear by counter-conditioning. There isn't any record of Albert after this, so for all we know the poor guy spent the rest of his life terrified of animals. Fortunately we've come a long way since 1920 -- scientists would never be allowed to perform an experiment such as this on a child today.

I was aware of this experiment before today. What I didn't know, was that Watson filmed it and it can actually be seen on YouTube.