Category: Animal Emotions

Animal Emotions Animal Training

How aversives and distractors can muck up your animal training

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 21 December, 2018
6 Comments on 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.

Animal Emotions

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

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 7 December, 2018
11 Comments on 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.

Animal Emotions Problem Solving

Separation anxiety – an interview with Eva Bertilsson

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 29 November, 2018
12 Comments on 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?

Animal Emotions Animal Training

Poisoning – or counter conditioning?

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 14 September, 2018
45 Comments on Poisoning – or counter conditioning?

Updated August 2023

Yes or no, true or false?

“If you combine negative reinforcement with positive reinforcement, you poison the learning process.”

Do you agree?

Do you poison the cue? The environment? Yourself? – if you after a negatively reinforced response add a positive reinforcer (AKA combined reinforcement)?

Some of the readers of this blog may say “yes”.

Some may say “no”.

Some may say “huh?”

After all, that question doesn’t make sense if you’re unfamiliar with those terms. Stay tuned, I’ll explain them in a minute.

I think the right answer is “it depends”.

Before we start untangling the potential pitfalls of combined reinforcement – why is this an important question?

Animal Emotions

Meme Week: Animal emotions

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 7 September, 2017
5 Comments on Meme Week: Animal emotions

I did an experiment. Which was a bit scary, because the outcome depended on you…! Or your fellow readers, who might have stumbled on this page before you.

So, I was a bit prepared that the whole project it might implode, if nobody joined. Luckily, I had just ordered some new spring bulbs, so I could go outside and do some planting instead, if things didn’t pan out as I imagined.

I had a plan B, as it were.

And now my garden is in rather a sorry state… because this project did get a lot of attention!

It was really fun and engaging, not to mention important, and it reached thousands of people – getting the impact I think that this topic deserves..!

I called it Meme Week.

Meme Week took place on my Facebook page.

Animal Emotions

Infected situations

I’m almost done giving my first online course!

I wanted to share some of the course content here on my blog, and choosing was difficult.

So, I got some help from my students. I asked them:

“Out of the course videos you’ve seen so far, which do you like the best? One that taught you something important that you think the rest of the world of pet owners or animal professionals would benefit from?”

Several students suggested chapter 11 from the GRIEF module entitled Infected Situations. So – here it is!