Author: Karolina Westlund, PhD

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Animal Emotions Animal Training Applied Ethology

Animal Welfare and her fairy godmothers

Updated August 2023

Once upon a time there was a princess.

She was quite furry and partly covered in scales, and also had a beak, and so she was named Animal.

Her last name was Welfare.

Animal Welfare had four fairy godmothers, who all gave her precious gifts.

The Fairy Godmothers of Animal Welfare

The fairy godmothers came from different scientific realms, and they were called Applied Ethology, Veterinary Medicine, Affective Neuroscience and Applied Behaviour Analysis – and each of them offered priceless, irreplaceable gifts to Animal Welfare.

And here’s the twist of this fairy tale:

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Categories
Animal Training

The Modern Principles of Shaping

Back in 1984, Karen Pryor wrote the 10 Laws of Shaping into her book Don’t shoot the dog.

That book, and those laws, have been extremely influential in shaping the contemporary animal training community. But inevitably, some of those laws became outdated.

So, 30 years later, she and her team updated them – they’re now called the Modern Principles of Shaping.

Incidentally, the principles can all be understood in terms of traffic signs.
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Animal Training

Good Trainer Habits

How do you become a better animal trainer?

Here’s four quick tips (discussed in more detail here):

  • learn from many teachers
  • learn from many individual animals
  • learn from several animal species
  • keep an open mind

Another useful approach is to acquire overall good trainer habits. And in the video below (chapter 12 from the final module of my online course Advanced Animal Training) I discuss what I think are 30 such useful trainer habits.

Not that the concepts are that terribly advanced, frankly – most of them are very useful to beginner trainers too!

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Animal Emotions Animal Training

How aversives and distractors can muck up your animal training

Is this familiar?

Your cat comes when called in the kitchen, but not in the garden.

Does the kitty ignore your recall in distracting environments?

Or your horse loads beautifully into the old trailer, but refuses to set hoof in the brand new one.

Or your dog sits on cue anywhere but in the vet’s office.

This problem could be about either (or both) of two issues:

  • You haven’t successfully communicated to the animal what you want him to do
  • The animal isn’t motivated to do what you’re asking

In order to successfully get behaviour in all contexts, you need to address both Communication and Motivation.

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Animal Emotions

How good are you at assessing your animal’s emotional state?

I recently did a little experiment on Facebook.

First, my friends and followers helped me name the company’s new mascot, and they also told me what species he was.

Apparently, he’s a racado (rat-cat-dog), and his name is Willis.

The experiment that many people helpfully participated in consisted of assessing his emotional state in different images on my Facebook page.

Meet Willis. What emotional states is he in?

I must admit, not all my friends and followers saw the point in this exercise – I intentionally didn’t explain where I wanted to go with the little experiment. Someone said she thought it was plain silly and expressed her disappointment in no uncertain terms.

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Categories
Animal Emotions Problem Solving

Separation anxiety – an interview with Eva Bertilsson

Separation anxiety, or to be more precise, separation-related problem behaviour (not necessarily caused by anxiety), is common in dogs.

About 50% of family dogs will show problem behaviour, related to separations, at some point in their lives.
  • What do we know about this phenomenon? Which dogs show it, and when?
  • What can we do to prevent, reduce or eliminate it?
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