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Why telling the difference between The True Truth and The Fake News is so difficult.

There’s lots of information out there on the internet. And sometimes it’s contradictory.

• About the state of the climate crisis.
• About who won the 2020 US election.
• About how best to train animals.

In this blog post, I will not discuss these topics at any length (although if you’re insatiably curious, I’ll reveal my position on them), but rather beg the question: how do we know which information to believe?

You may think it’s by somehow recognizing truths and rejecting false information.

It’s just that we humans are not very good at doing that.

We very often reject information, even though it’s true.

And we accept information, even though it’s false.

And we all do it.

Every. Single. Person. Does this.

Me.

You.

Aunt Peggie.

Our view of the world is skewed, in some way or another. We’ve all built our personal understanding of the world on a mix of truths and falsehoods. Hopefully mostly truths, but still…

In essence, we all look at the world through partly broken glasses.  

Disconcerting as that realization may be, I think that simply being aware that our glasses are partly broken will make it easier to fix them.

The purpose of this blog post is to alert you to your broken glasses, give ideas about how to fix them, and also how to go about helping others with their glasses.

Continue reading “Fact or Fake?”

When I was little, I became mesmerized by Dr Dolittle.

Dr Dolittle could talk to animals. He’d ask them questions, they’d vocalize, he’d nod wisely and translate their chirps, whistles, woofs and meows to plain English, to the astonishment of those present.

It was my all-time favourite movie, when I was nine.

Side-note: the 2,5-hour film from 1967 was broadcast on TV at a time in the evening when I was supposed to go to bed about three-quarters of the way through. So after one hour and 45 minutes, dad said: “time to go to bed, Karolina”.

And I pleaded. Threatened. Screamed.

To no avail; there were to be no exceptions to that bedtime hour. I remember being lead to my room, still protesting loudly. And then I spent several hours having a loud and ugly meltdown alone in my room, way past the time that the film ended, and at some point somewhat triumphantly shrieking at the door: “If only you’d let me watch the whole film I’d be asleep by now!!!”

Continue reading “Talking to animals”

Last week, I asked the people on my email list, and my Facebook community, whether they listened to any animal-related podcasts, and if so, which ones.

I don’t know what I expected, maybe a handful of answers. Little did I know…

517 people answered, and I just summarized the wealth of data that they provided.

Continue reading “Most-listened-to animal-related podcasts (August 2020)”

Is this familiar?

You’ve been training tricks with your dog, and want to impress some visiting friends with his new skills.

You ask him for a high five.

He gives a high five, then he lies down, plays dead, rolls over… all the while throwing expectant looks at you, as if saying “is it this?!”

In other words, you ask for one specific behaviour, and he enthusiastically responds by giving you his entire learned repertoire of tricks.

What’s going on?

Well, in technical terms, he’s not under Stimulus Control.

In less technical terms, he hasn’t yet quite learned about cues. Continue reading “How to teach a cue”

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 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:

Continue reading “Animal Welfare and her fairy godmothers”

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.

Continue reading “The Modern Principles of Shaping”