White Mountain College for Pets - Blog
The Animal Mind in Human Terms
Posted by Mike on February 11, 2010 under 1. Info Collection | 
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Giant Hamster: pictures of Caplin Rous the pet capybara at home in Texas: “In pictures: Caplin Rous the pet capybara at home in Texas.”
Posted by Mike on February 3, 2010 under 1. Info Collection | Be the First to Comment
Baby gorilla pictured ‘relaxing’ in human-like pose: “It’s a hard life for some but not for this baby gorilla pictured relaxing in a
human-like pose resting in the sun.”
Posted by Mike on February 1, 2010 under 1. Info Collection | Be the First to Comment
Cats manipulate their owners with a cry embedded in a purr [Not Exactly Rocket Science]:While dogs can often be taught new tricks, cat-owners will be all too aware that it can be very difficult to persuade them to do something they don’t want to do. Eddie Izzard summed it up best in his legendary Pavlov’s cat sketch, where felines are quite capable of outfoxing (outcatting?) eminent Welsh-Russian psychologists. Real cats may be less devious, but only just - new research suggests that they are very skilled at getting their human owners to do their bidding.
When they want food, domestic cats will often purr in a strangely plaintive way that their owners find difficult to ignore. By analysing the structure of these calls, Karen McComb from the University of Sussex has found out why. On the surface, the ’solicitation purrs’ are based on the same low-pitched sounds that contented moggies make, but embedded within them is a high-pitched signal that sounds like a cry or a meow. It’s this hidden signal that makes the purr of a hungry cat so irresistible to humans.
McComb has a long history of research into animal communication and she has studied the calls of African elephants, red deer, lions and macaques. But it was her own cat, Pepo (pictured above), who provided the inspiration for this study.
‘He consistently woke me up in the mornings with very insistent purring,’ she said.”I wondered why this purring sounded so annoying and was so difficult to ignore.’ Talking with other cat owners, I found that some of them also had cats who showed strikingly similar behaviour.’ As I was an academic who actually worked on vocal communication [in mammals], I had the right background, tools and collaborators to tackle this question directly.’
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(Via ScienceBlogs: Life Science.)
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Now that you have determined the object you would like your dog to locate, we can begin to teach the dog to discriminate the scent of your specific object. For this tutorial, we will use a small stick that has been “primed” with a couple drops of vanilla scent. Remember that you don’t have to use a stick, but can use any object you desire. I recommend “priming” the object with a specific scent, if it doesn’t have one naturally. Over time we will decrease the amount of “priming” scent that we apply, but that will be addressed in a later tutorial.
Begin with the stick in your hand and the dog nearby. Hold out the stick and soon as the dog’s nose touches the stick ( which should happen rather quickly, to investigate the new object ), mark the moment with a “good!” or a clicker click ( if the dog is clicker trained ), and offer a small piece of food reward. Retract the stick and move a few feet away. Repeat the exercise in this manner five more times.
By this point, your dog is likely associating that touching the stick earns both praise and treat. Work on this a few times each day, then watch for part three of this tutorial.
Questions during the process? Please don’t hesitate to comment or send a message!
At the end of this tutorial series, we will be accepting video of your dog’s progress to be posted in our video section and possibly included in one of our online lessons.
