Inside the 3rd Canine Science Forum

Top right and bottom left photos courtesy of Tamás Faragó of the Family Dog Project

What is the Canine Science Forum (CSF)? A place for scientists to convene and present research on canine behavior and biology? 

Maybe the CSF is a science gathering where dog attendees mill about and discuss their latest research, such as "Owner Response to Urine on the Floor: A Review" and "The Best Street Food of 2012."


At the 3rd Canine Science Forum in Barcelona, 250 people from 25 different countries came together for three days to share their latest research, mingle, discuss new ideas, occasionally disagree and of course, toss a few back.

Canine Science Forum. Photo courtesy of Tamás Faragó of the Family Dog Project

Canine Science Forum. Photo courtesy of Tamás Faragó of the Family Dog Project

The worst thing about any conference is the continual state of being seated, but I guess I’ll have to wait until I have a say at conferences and can create a standing zone.

Keynote speakers presented on a range of topics: Olof Liberg from the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences described the complex issues faced by wolves in Scandinavia (the situation honestly feels like a bad soap opera); Frank Ascione from the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver discussed the relationship between partner violence and violence toward pets, and Márta Gácsi of the Family Dog Project in Budapest provided an overview of attachment research in dogs (you can also read my summary of attachment research in The Bark article Dog Smart: Exploring the Canine Mind; the content is very similar to Dr. Gácsi's presentation).

Here are some conference highlights...

Teasing Posters

Remember when you were in 4th grade and you made a science poster? Mine was about Emperor Penguins. Adult scientists also make posters! But instead of simply describing say, the phylogeny of Emperor Penguins, (adult) researcher present their latest projects and research on posters. Grown-ups' science posters in action:

http://www.psmag.com/science/science-posters-given-a-new-life-online-34066/

Poster Teasers are a nifty addition to "normal" poster sessions. Poster Teasers are brief talks where researchers go on stage and, in 2 minutes, introduce their research and entice conference goers to visit their posters for more details. Here's my Poster Teaser ending:

Poster enticement! Visit my "guilty look" poster.

While the CSF certainly incorporates its share of cute dog photos, the conference focuses on unearthing All That Is Canid.

It’s impossible to summarize three days of lectures and science posters, but here’s a taste of research presented at the 3rd Canine Science Forum in Barcelona. View all the conference Abstracts on my website: Dog Spies

Applied Research

Those in the field of Applied Animal Behavior tend to study the behavior of domesticated and utilized animals. This is my main focus because my Masters from the University of Edinburgh is in Applied Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare.

Research: Wolves and livestock guarding dogs

Livestock guarding dog (matching is key!)
http://www.sheepandgoat.com/predator.html

Title: Interactions between wolves and livestock guarding dogs on a French alpine pasture. What actually happens when livestock guarding dogs (LGD) and wolves meet up at night? A tea party? Joint moon-howling competitions? 

Jean-Marc Landry and colleagues explored this question: using an infrared camera, they captured 23 nightime interactions between LGDs and wolves. In most of the encounters (22/23), LGDs did not engage in physical contact with the wolves. The presence of LGDs did not stop wolves from approaching sheep, and wolves returned, even after chases by the LGDs. LGDs could be disruptive, but they did not prevent wolves from spending time on fields. In terms of distance, they found that two LGDs chased the wolves farther than one LGD. 

This study reminds us that we don't have to simply make guesses about the interactions between LGDs and wolves at night. We can explore actual behavior interactions. Effectiveness of LGDs can also be investigated. Of course, effectiveness is in the eye of the beholder. If LGDs are brought on board to banish wolves from fields, this did not appear to happen (in this case). But if LGDs are desired for disrupting wolf predatory behavior, this does appear to be happening. And while not necessarily the best for wolf predation, don't forget about livestock guarding llamas!!!

Research: Urine and castration

Title: The effect of castrating male dogs on their use of the vomeronasal organ when investigating conspecific urine deposits. Because I study dogs, I have good reason to constantly talk about urine. Urine matters to dogs, and therefore, urine matters to me! Daisy Berthoud and her colleagues wondered if castrating dogs affects their urine exploration. 

http://barkingbodhi.blogspot.fr/2009/03/urine-good-company.html

Dogs investigate urine by sniffing, and some will even lick the source and then perform teeth chattering and salivating behaviors. Teeth chattering and salivating, which could also be considered flehman-like behaviors (FLB), are thought to aid in the decoding of the urine information. 

Berthoud and colleagues wondered whether castration affects teeth chattering and salivating (FLB) in the presence of urine. Particularly because castration in other species, such as bulls, can decrease FLB.

The results! When dogs encountered urine samples, “Intact male dogs displayed flehmen-like behaviour considerably more often than castrated males.” They suggest that castration might “influence the range of chemosensory cues perceived by dogs.”

Research: Shelter dogs and behavior evaluations

Title: Development and Implementation of a Unique Online Portal for Collecting Data From a Standardized Behavior Evaluation With Shelter Dogs. Animal shelters customarily run behavior evaluations on new animals that enter their facilities. Amy Marder and a slew of researchers at the Center for Shelter Dogs in Boston, MA have created an online system to collect data from standardized behavior evaluations.

Match up II

“The program is designed to help shelters learn about the personality and needs of each dog so that behavioral interventions can be implemented when needed and successful matches made.” The program, Match-Up II, is available online.

The online format helps pool evaluation results from different shelters into a centralized database. Their goals: establish a database to compare dog behavior and trends, make behavior evaluations faster and easier, automatically generate personality scores, and produce summary reports with training recommendations. Thanks to Seana Dowling-Guyer, MS for presenting this research.

Research: Relationships, aggression and fake hands

Title: Fake hands, true bites? Alexa Capra and colleagues explored the general topic of dog aggression towards people. Specifically, do dogs respond differently to an artificial hand that is being held and used by a known person vs. an artificial hand used by an unknown person?

Artificial hands are often used to explore aggressive responses in dogs. Why? So real hands don’t get bitten. Sounds good to me! Here are some video clips (from a different organization) of dogs eating food and responding to a fake hand.

http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2012/apr/29/offering-a-helping-paw-pet-rehab-helps-transform/

Capra explored whether there was a difference in how dogs respond to an artificial hand approaching dogs' food when the hand was held by a stranger or by the owner. Was the dog’s reaction influenced by the relationship with the person handling the hand? They found that dogs' aggressive scores were higher with the stranger than with the owner. This is an interesting element as the "fake hand" used in behavior evaluations is often considered a neutral stimulus. 

Cognition Research

To non-scientists, cognition might seem like a fancy shmancy term to describe extraordinary skills and competencies, possibly only possessed by some species. But cognition, or cognition research, is really a catch-all term to describe the exploration of attention, memory, perception, problem-solving and mental imagery skills. All of these topics, of course, can be explored in canids. Here is some cognition research from the CSF:

Research: What is fair?

Title: Sensitivity to Unequal Rewards in the Domestic Dog: Fair is Fine, but More is Better. Alexandra Horowitz explored how dogs interpret a social situation where they are sometimes treated the same as another dog (both dogs receive one piece of food), sometimes treated “better” (aka receive more food than another dog) and sometimes treated “worse” (aka receive less food than another dog).

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/12/09/friday-morning-open-thread-fairness/

When humans are presented with this type of scenario, we often take note of how others are treated and have a propensity towards fairness. We don’t like inequity in any sense, regardless of whether we are overpaid or underpaid. Inequity is inequity.

What did dogs do? “Dogs selected a trainer who had treated them ‘‘unfairly,’’ yet who presented a potentially greater opportunity for future rewards.” Dogs sought out food from the person who dished out more food, even though that person had not been so generous to them. (This study, Fair is Fine, but More is Better: Limits to Inequity Aversion in the Domestic Dog, was recently published by Alexandra Horowitz, the head of my lab, in Social Justice Research, and I’m sure there will be more coverage of it). 

Research: What are you looking at?

Title: Matching pictures with the appropriate sound: results from an eye-tracking study of dogs and 14-month-old infants. Researchers are now using eye tracking devices to explore exactly where dogs are looking when presented with different visual stimuli. 

http://seejamieblog.com/2010/05/nature-study-dogs/

Anna Gergely and colleagues explored where dogs look when they are simultaneously presented with different images -- a dog face and a human face -- and also simultaneously presented with an auditory signal, either the sound of barking or the sound of a human voice. 

Dogs looked longer at the image that corresponded with the appropriate auditory stimulus: when dogs heard barking, they looked longer at the dog than the human, and when they heard a human voice, they looked longer at the human face. Go dogs!

This is cool because dogs are showing a “sophisticated ability to match auditory and visual stimuli.” Dogs are not, for example, simply looking at the image of their own species first.

http://www.assistancedogsinternational.org/adiconference.php

The CSF was immediately followed by the Assistance Dogs International Conference 2012. Karen Overall discussed the process of and merits to publishing scientific articles on the dog-human interaction (publishing is a good idea), and Daniel Mills described the need to increase awareness of the value of dogs in society. Jaume Fatjó reminded the audience that if you want to incorporate animal assisted therapy into healthcare plans, you need to convince others of the economic advantage to doing so.

That's the short of it! 
Abstracts from the 3rd Canine Science Forum are on the Science! page of my website.

1st Canine Science Forum 2008, Budapest, Hungary

2nd Canine Science Forum 2010, Vienna, Austria

3rd Canine Science Forum 2012, Barcelona, Spain

4th Canine Science Forum 2014, Lincoln, UK -- See you in two years!! 
~ Many thanks to all the conference organizers ~