A paper in Nature Scientific Reports documents that dogs displaced by the Fukushima disaster (March 11 2011) show persistent signs of stress and symptoms of PTSD. The authors compared dogs displaced by the disaster in Fukushima to abandoned dogs in Kanagawa, a region not affected by the earthquake. Compared to the Kanagawan dogs, the Fukushima…
Whether we are talking about zoo animals or our own pets, blood collection usually involves restraint. Forcible restraint is a stressful experience (for dog and handler), it can produce a fearful response which often results in defensive aggression. While the resulting behavior is what we see, there is also a complex biochemical cascade that accompanies…
“As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror…” – Lucretius, On the Nature of Things Viennese physician Franz-Joseph Gall (1758-1828) believed that organs on the surface of the brain…
These individual differences are of the highest importance for us, for they are often inherited, as must be familiar to every one; and they thus afford materials for natural selection to act on and accumulate, in the same manner as man accumulates in any given direction individual differences in his domesticated productions. — Charles Darwin,…
Another example of Brad Pattison’s twisted view of dogs seemed appropriate before the upcoming book review. When is submissive behavior an attempt at dominance? In an episode of At the End of My Leash, Pattison meets a black GSD with some fear-aggression issues that manifested in a lot of barking and some lunging. It also…
Science and Dogs 
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