In honor of national guide dog month, I'm reprinting excerpts of an interview I did several years ago with seven experienced blind people who've used guide dogs most of their lives.  Here they compare problem solving strategies between 36 dogs representing six breeds.  Compared to my usual posts, it's a lengthy conversation, but if you've lived with a Lab, Golden, German Shepherd, Aussie, Border Collie, Flat Coat,  Poodle or hybrid of these breeds, you'll be fascinated by the comments.

 “Because we can’t see, we don’t know the particulars of what we’re commanding our dogs to do. The dog has to stand up to us, to get it through to us that something is there that we don’t know about, then find a way to get us out of a dangerous situation. A dog that isn’t comfortable holding his ground isn’t suited to the job.”

Some blind handlers argue that there are marked differences in each breed’s approach to guide work, while others think that the traits that make good guides neutralize the larger behaviors that characterize each breed. 

One blind handler who has worked with a German Shepherd for 10 years, a Lab for seven, two different Golden Retrievers for 15 years, and now has two years’ experience under his belt working with a Golden-Lab cross says that there are some physical characteristics that are different among breeds, such as the gait and how the dog feels through the harness. “Even so, the dog’s unique personality, combined with the person’s — how they work together and what they expect of each other — that’s where the differences are.” 

“It’s a 50-50 relationship,” says a handler who’s worked with one Lab, two mixed-breed Labs and two Goldens, and now is partnered with a Lab-Poodle cross. “Neither one of us is in total control at any given time. Both of our lives depend on what the other one does. Neither of us may be able to make a safe street crossing alone, but together we do it gracefully."

“How my dogs dealt with obstacles isn’t, in my opinion, a function of breed-specific differences,” says a seasoned 25-year guide dog user who has partnered with an Airedale, a Border Collie mix, an Australian Shepherd and, briefly, a Siberian Husky. “My Airedale, as I recall him, was quick to generalize about the concept "obstacle” but wasn’t particularly good at scoping out his environment and making decisions in advance.” The Aussie and the Border Collie mix seemed to generalize quickly.

“The Border Collie mix had very high head carriage and was by far the very best dog I've worked when it came to overhead hazards,” he said. “The Aussie has been harder to teach naturally occurring overheads like tree limbs, but whether that's a breed thing or a result of their tendency to work with their heads a little low, I'm not sure.”

Another woman who has worked with two Shepherd guides and one Lab-Golden cross said, “In my opinion, you might say that the retrievers’ style provides more information about the specifics ofthe environment, but the Shepherds’ style makes for more efficient travel. My Shepherds, in comparison to my retriever, both typically looked farther ahead as they guided. They corrected for upcoming obstacles from a distance and our travel path was typically a smooth line. Sudden turns or stops happened only in response to an obstacle that unexpectedly crossed our intended path. My retriever cross clearly does not take the same approach. In general, this dog will stop and show me the obstacle, and he will almost always seek prompting from me on which way to go next.”

Another typical difference between dogs, explains a blind handler is their approach to routes.“Personally I find that my retrievers enjoyed familiar routes. In comparison, my Shepherd gets bored with routine, so you have to get creative with routes and mix things up,” she says.

She adds that retrievers are looking to please the handler, as if asking, “Did I do what you wanted, am I making you happy?” whereas her shepherds have been motivated by doing the job and solving the problems. “With Shepherds, it’s not so much about what pleases me as it is about pleasing themselves,” she says.

A guide dog handler who has worked with three Labs, a Lab mix, a Golden Retriever and a German Shepherd explained, “If I were to generalize,” she says, “I’d say my Labs often worked up to an obstacle before deciding what to do about it, while my shepherd would decide in advance what to do, perhaps starting the turn more gradually as we approached the barrier. My Golden would stop to show me before trying to work it out.”

Eight guide dogs and 34 years later, a handler  contemplated her experiences with four Labs, two Goldens, one Shepherd, and one Flat-coat Retriever. “My Flat-coat solved problems by coming to a full stop. Sometimes he would just stand there and I could feel his head moving. People said that he looked like he was weighing all the possibilities. Then he would make his decision. And in nine years of partnership he never made a mistake.”

One woman got her first German Shepherd in 1996 after working with three Labs. She says she had to learn the body language that was unique to the Shepherd. “At first I thought when my Shepherd would insist on going a certain way and I wanted to go another that she was being stubborn or willful. I soon discovered that if I acknowledged her for what she was showing me, and then asked her to go the direction I wanted to go, she was totally fine with that. My second Shepherd is the same way.”

Regardless of genealogy, each dog takes a unique approach to problem solving. “I noticed that the Aussie I’m working with now had a very strong preference for traveling on one or another side of a street when we walked home from work,” explained his handler. “Eventually, I figured out the preference stemmed from whether it was or had recently been raining. One side of the street was commercial, the other had lots of trees with branches that hung low when wet.”

“My Goldens were much more attuned to my reactions to things. If I did hit a branch, I needed only to flinch and they both acted as if they had been corrected. I would describe my Labrador as being solid, but she had the attitude that things would move for her or she would move them. She was careful, generally, but also had no compunction about moving me through some tight gaps. It wasn’t always pretty, but she would get you where you needed to go safely and with enthusiasm.”

Person and dog work as a team, each contributing to a relationship built on trust that begins during class, then deepens and broadens over time. Says a guide dog user with 35 years of experience, “I think developing trust is incumbent on the person. That’s who sets the tone of the partnership so that the dog learns to be, in essence, not just a guide, but responsible for the person’s safety.”

A blind woman who has traveled with guides since 1968 said, “My assumption is that my dog is acting to keep us safe until he proves to be distracted or is putting his agenda ahead of mine. Sure, if that sudden plunge proves to be because my Lab dove for a French fry, the appropriate correction needs to be made. Extra work to minimize that behavior may be called for, but ‘follow your dog’ has to be the first response if we are going to learn to trust and read each other. My safety depends on my ability to read their reactions and go with it and figure out the ‘whys’ later.”

“Working a guide dog is like dancing,” she explains. “And being responsive to my partner’s moves is how it works best for me. I've had had two very large Labs both with a lot of initiative. They seldom asked for my input, made quick swift movements and expected I would be able to keep up and go with them. They were more likely to try to interpose their bodies between me and muscle me out of the way or into safety. My Golden, and my small Lab were likely to be cautious and refuse to leave the curb until they determined that a car they watched was not going to move toward us.”

One man described all his dogs as having been keen observers.“They’ve all had similar complex personalities,” he says. “They enjoyed their work and have been more than willing to guide and do things such as squeeze into small spaces and stay for hours, only because I have asked them to.”

A thirty year guide dog veteran summed it up. "I've owned plenty of dogs as pets, but my relationship with the half dozen guide dogs I've worked with was different: All of my guide dogs seemed to own me rather than the other way around.”

A sleep-deprived gentleman once asked me, “How is it that dogs can bark so long? When I yell for hours on end, I lose my voice.” Then he went on to describe the dogs in his neighborhood, whose barking bouts lasted longer than all of the Wagner operas combined.

Anyone who’s experienced an epic canine oratorio has probably wondered, “What’s going on? Do dogs just like to hear the sound of their voices?” Until recently, some researchers thought this was the case, taking the position that because dogs bark at almost anything and everything and for hours on end with no apparent reply, dog barking must not be a specific form of communication. Rather, barking is just a loud and obnoxious way for them to say, “Hey! Look at me!” More specific information, it was postulated, comes from reading body expression and olfactory messages.

Given the sparse number of studies on vocal communication in dogs, this contention seemed reasonable until consideration of the ever-expanding research on songbirds, ground squirrels and monkeys provided a very different view.

For decades, while some looked at dogs and pooh-poohed their barks as nuisance noise, others—such as Dr. Peter Marler, professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and a pioneer in the field of vocal communication in birds—were taking a closer look at the sounds that animals, including the common chicken, make. Says Marler, “Chickens are an obvious case … to most people, the sounds are a kind of noise, or vicarious vocalizations that have little meaning. But this view could not be more wrong. In fact, many studies show that chickens have a very rich and elaborate vocal repertoire, and that different calls mean different things.”

These studies started with the finding that roosters have specific types of predator-alarm-calls, one for aerial predators such as hawks, and another for ground predators. Play-back studies—in which hens hear taped versions of these calls in the absence of both a predator and visual signals from the rooster—show that the calls deliver specific information. Hens duck for cover upon hearing a recording of the aerial call and extend their necks and look for the danger when they hear the ground-alarm-call. These responses to the respective calls tell us the calls have specific meanings to those who hear them.

And those aren’t the only interesting chicken calls. Roosters also make a particular call when they find a morsel to eat, and this sound, part of the rooster’s courtship routine, serves to attract hens. As with the alarm calls, recorded food calls played back from behind a barrier with a hen on the other side will cause the hen to approach when she hears them. What’s more, states Marler, “If the calls were recorded from a male who had a very choice food item, like a cricket, she’ll approach faster than if the calls are given [for] a piece of grain or peanut. So the calls convey some information about food quality.” And, like the alarm calls, these differential responses indicate the calls have meaning.

But what about those calls, like barking, that go on and on with no obvious response from other animals? Dr. Don Owings, professor of psychology and animal behavior at the University of California, Davis, says, “Call communication can be organized on different time frames, so that you don’t see an immediate response to each vocalization. You have to look at the effect of signaling in a time frame that is appropriate for the signaling behavior.”

This longer time frame reveals interesting things. For instance, California ground squirrels respond to mammalian predators by uttering a chatter vocalization. Other squirrels respond by running to their burrow or standing up and looking around. If the predator lingers, the calling ground squirrels move from an erratically spaced, episodic chatter to a highly rhythmic “deet-deet-deet.” Observation reveals that individuals who hear the vocalization don’t startle or respond to each vocalization, and often return to their feeding and previous activities. However, Owings’ student, Jim Loughry, looked more closely at the overall activity and body postures over a longer time period and found that squirrels listening to this rhythmic vocalization were more vigilant overall. Even if they were eating, they would eat while sitting upright as they scanned their surroundings.

So what possible functions could vocalizations that carry on for hours at a time have? Well, male songbirds sing for hours at a time to attract females and to defend their territory. Additionally, during breeding season, wolves howl for hours at a time with no detectable reply. This howling may function as a beacon to attract females from neighboring packs. Perhaps prolonged canine vocalizations have a long-term function as well?

In 2000, armed with the rich body of literature on vocal communication and the support of those already well-established in the field, I decided to pursue the question of barking in dogs. Yes, some dogs do bark incessantly and some seem to bark in any and every context, but was it possible that barks were slightly different in different contexts, so that dogs actually produced bark subtypes? If so, perhaps these vocalizations could be specific forms of communication.

With the advent of improved acoustic-analysis equipment, others had been able to test similar theories in other animals. As mentioned earlier, Owings found that squirrels emit chatters when they see mammalian predators and occasionally with avian predators; they also chatter when having aggressive interactions with another animal and immediately after copulating with a female. Though these findings might lead one to conclude that the vocalization is not functionally specific, modern sound equipment revealed that the chatter calls are structurally different in different contexts.

Similarly, Dr. Julia Fischer, a researcher at the Max–Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that Chacma baboons have different bark vocalizations for different contexts, including an alarm bark that is structurally different from a contact bark, which is uttered when mother and offspring are separated.

To test my hypothesis about bark subtypes, I found ten barking dogs and recorded them in three different situations. In situation one, the disturbance situation, the dog was recorded while barking at the sound of the doorbell. In situation two, the isolation situation, I recorded the dog when it was locked outside, isolated from its owner. And in situation three, the play situation, I recorded barks as the dog played with its owner or another dog. This sounds simple but surprisingly, even dogs dubbed excessive barkers often couldn’t be used because they only barked in two of the three contexts, which suggests that maybe dogs don’t really bark at any- and everything.

In order to ensure that I had enough barks to give a good idea of the average bark for each context for each specific dog, we set up the dogs in each situation many different times on many different days over a three-month period. Once I’d collected enough barks, more than 4,600 in all, I turned to my collaborator, Dr. Brenda McCowan, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in acoustic communication in animals ranging from dolphins to cattle. Using a sound-analysis program that converts audio to a visual representation of pitch-over-time and amplitude- over-time and a computer macro (a set of instructions for the computer to follow) designed by McCowan, we took 60 sequential measurements over time for one bark, or along the visual representation of each bark.

The data yielded clear results. Dog barks were different in the different contexts and therefore, could be categorized into subtypes. The doorbell-disturbance barks were relatively harsh, low-pitched and with little pitch variation throughout. Dogs blurted these barks out full force and so fast that they were often fused into what I formally dubbed “superbarks.” Isolation barks, on the other hand, were higher pitched and more tonal, with more variation in both pitch and amplitude. Usually, they occurred as single barks, but some dogs definitely learned to bark more repetitively when doing so eventually reunited them with their owner. The play barks were similar to the isolation barks, except that they usually occurred in clusters rather than singly.

Not surprisingly, we also found that dogs could be identified by their barks. This basically means that as you lie in bed listening to the sound of the neighboring canid’s greatest hits, you should be able to identify exactly which neighboring canid is the offending artist.

So what do these findings mean? Well, we can’t tell whether dogs intentionally alter their barks to deliver a message to other dogs or people. The only way to determine this would be to teach the dog English so that he could tell us, “I am now intentionally changing my bark to deliver this message.” Most likely, the variation is a reflection of the internal motivational state the dog is in at the time that he barks.

What we can tell is that because there are specific bark subtypes, barks have the potential to play specific communicative rolls and provide specific information—intentional or unintentional—to the animals, including humans, who are listening. Not specific like, “Timmy’s stuck in the well! The one to the left of the big oak tree on the other side of the creek!” More like, “I’m separated from you! Come get me!” or “Intruder alert!” Furthermore, since bark subtypes occur in specific contexts, we can learn to tell what our dog is saying by listening to his barks and then examining the context. His “woof” for an unknown intruder may be different from his “ruff” when he alerts to a friend approaching the house. And his “huff” to come inside may be different when the desire is more urgent.

But is the barking actually communicative? Well, for a vocalization to be communication, the animal who hears the signal must respond in a specific way. As with the chicken food-call and alarm-call cases, this is usually tested through play-back studies, and such studies have not yet been performed on dogs. However, a study by David MacDonald and Geoff Carr on free-roaming dogs in Italy suggests that barks can have specific effects on other dogs, even when the “barkers” can’t be seen. The free-roaming dogs in this study lived in small groups and scavenged at local dump sites. When the largest group of dogs barked in a group prior to heading toward the dump site from up to one kilometer away, dogs in smaller groups consistently evacuated the site; they apparently knew that they were no match for the larger gang. And on a more familiar note, Marler points out that if we pay attention, it’s easy to notice that barking usually elicits a response from other dogs.

But this is only half the picture. Says Owings, “For the vocalization to be communicative, the vocalizers should be sensitive to social contexts and consequences.” That is, the animal producing the vocalization should adjust it based on the behavior of the listeners. While there is little research in this area, general observations indicate that this happens too. For instance, when one dog barks at the doorbell and another dog, or even the resident human, joins in a barky “No! No!”, the dog responds with louder and more prolonged bark behavior. Take away his back-up and suddenly, the initial barking bout abates. Or then there’s the dog who barks at you until you toss his toy, but barks harder and louder when you’re on the phone because that’s the time when you’re most likely to toss the toy quickly in order to get him to quiet down. These cases provoke the question: What exactly is the role of the human (the primary animal to whom many barks are directed) in the development of bark behavior in dogs?

Clearly, there are an infinite number of questions about barking and its communicative function for the dog, and there’s much catch-up needed to reach the same level of understanding that we have for chickens and squirrels. But it all starts with a simple study showing that dogs have different barks in different contexts, and plugs away, developing and answering one question at a time.

To test your own ability to interpret dog barks, or to read more about barks as communication or as a nuisance behavior, visit Dr. Yin’s “Nerdbook” website.

In an engrossing new book, Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves, science historian Laurel Braitman investigates the symptoms, causes and recoveries associated with behavioral disturbances in a wide variety of social animals. Starting with her own dog, Oliver, who suffered from debilitating separation anxiety, she discovered that mental illness in animals looks a lot like it does in people. In a recent conversation on a sunny afternoon in Berkeley, she shared some of her insights with us.

Claudia Kawczynska: In the book, you talk about the use of psychopharmaceuticals, pointing out that not only is one in five Americans on them, but also, increasing numbers of dogs are being given them as well. But there seems to be a divide in the veterinary field on their use. After looking into this subject, how do you feel about it?

Laurel Braitman: Sometimes our dogs need them, or the drugs are used as a band-aid to correct for stressors in a dog’s life that could be changed. Sometimes the drugs don’t work. They don’t always work for people either actually, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try them in the right situation. E’Lise Christensen, a veterinary behaviorist, said that if the dogs she sees were humans, most of them would be committed to in-patient facilities. That is why she thinks drugs are useful in really extreme situations—to keep dogs from hurting themselves while giving behavior therapy time to work.

It’s really hard to generalize, though; so much depends on the individual dog. A certain dosage of, let’s say, Xanax, may make some dogs so blissed out that they don’t want a treat or whatever is being offered as an incentive. Other dogs might do really well on the same dosage. And different dogs will react differently to different drugs.

A lot of the behaviorists I spoke with are seeing dogs on dosages that would have calmed most canines, but are in the behaviorists’ waiting rooms because the drug didn’t work for them. There are also cases where a drug causes other issues—such as reducing inhibitions so that a previously-friendly dog becomes more aggressive.

CK: How similar are certain human and canine disorders?

LB: Panic disorders in humans are really similar to canine separation anxiety; when we’re flooded with panic, our first instinct is to escape. The same feeling drives the behaviors seen in many dogs anxious at being left alone; in my own dog’s case, he fled by jumping out of a window.

With humans, we assume that the roots of the disorder have to be dealt with in therapy over time—that we need to understand the triggers for someone’s panic. The approach for nonhumans should be the same.

Drugs are helpful when a dog is so upset, so distressed or suffering so much that the behavioral things that experts such as Ian Dunbar suggest just aren’t possible. Pharmaceuticals act like panic buttons; they can help the animal tap into the physical and emotional resources they need to be able to learn.

CK: It seems like there are at least two approaches to calming an anxious dog. Some veterinarians (such as the late Mel Richardson) believe that soothing an anxious dog isn’t the best approach—that petting only rewards the panicked behavior. But others, including Patricia McConnell, make a compelling case for the opposite approach. This is an important difference.

LB: McConnell is right! Dogs are complex thinkers and will not automatically equate you petting them with positive reinforcement. If they did, dog training would be a hell of a lot simpler! The example that Mel gave, and I included in the book, is different, however. A patient of his came in with a dog who acted scared in her living room, ever since a plate dropped off a wall during a fight the woman had with her boyfriend. The woman may have been rewarding her dog for hugging the sides of the room, not necessarily comforting him for something that was stressful. We do at times unwittingly positively reinforce our animals for behaviors we then find undesirable; but soothing your dog during thunderstorms or fireworks displays makes a lot of sense.

I always comforted Oliver during thunderstorms, I didn’t ignore him, and clearly if that worked he wouldn’t have had a thunderstorm phobia. I think we approach these problems with an almost patriarchal kind of “tough-it-up” attitude. It doesn’t work with children and it doesn’t work with dogs. It doesn’t account for the fluidity and complexity of the human or other animal mind. Dogs know we are reading their distress and they read ours. No other creature on the planet—including other people in my opinion—is better at reading our emotions than dogs. They’ve spent at least 15,000 years at it.

CK: Oliver was a purebred Bernese Mountain Dog. In your research, did you find that abnormal behaviors were more, or less, likely to be found in purebreds?

LB: I wish there were a good answer to that. Every behaviorist I spoke with, and many trainers, were familiar with breed-specific manifestations of mental illness. Tail-chasing, shadow-chasing, OCD. Oliver suffered from an extreme case of separation anxiety, but I didn’t find that was something frequently seen in Berners.

(By the way, I’m not saying that shelter dogs won’t have issues; they could have the same or different problems related to abandonment, phobias, or lack of socialization.) We should really have honest talks with breeders about the mental health of their dogs, but we rarely do. Every breeder will say that they breed “family” dogs. But I have to wonder if—once they’ve spent a fortune on breeding pairs, and the pups are potentially quite valuable—they will really take one out of the mix if he or she develops mental problems.

CK: It was interesting to read that Nicole Cottam, who was at Tufts Animal Behavior Clinic, thought that jealousy was the leading cause of canine aggression.

LB: Jealousy is an issue for many more creatures than dogs. It came up a lot in regards to other social animals too, like elephants and the other great apes. Why would we, or our dogs, be the only ones to experience it? Our pack, our families, our troops are everything and it can be threatening if we perceive, rightly or wrongly, that we may lose someone’s attention.

In the context of elephants, it’s a matter of public safety. Almost everyone I talked to in Thailand believed that most elephant-on-elephant and elephant-on-human violence comes from jealousy. If a young man who works with elephants visits a girlfriend, they say, he has to shower many times before he interacts with his elephant again and, sometimes even that’s not enough. He’ll need to bring a truckload of pineapples or bananas to win back the trust of his elephant.

Elephants can also be extremely dangerous if one of their elephant friends becomes closer to another elephant and ignores them. Or if a person is feeding elephants and doesn’t feed them at exactly the same time—that can be dangerous as well.

Dogs, of course, can be aggressive and protective around food. But perhaps it may also be that the dog is jealous—that he or she feels another dog is getting more of your attention because the other dog is being fed first.

CK: How can we know that dogs experience jealousy?

LB: Jealousy is actually the darker side of a positive emotion. That is, if we build our lives around those near to us and have close relationships with them, and then suddenly those relationships are taken away, we are going to feel bad. Everything in us wants to connect—we are social beings. Most of us are also our dogs’ primary “other” animal.

Clearly, that is what happened in my dog’s case. He went from being the center of his first family’s world to its fringes because there was a new baby in the house. [Ed. note: Oliver’s previous owners moved him to the garage, among other things, when he started to act out.] I have nothing but empathy for the family. They didn’t mean to hurt him; they just didn’t know what else to do.

CK: How do we know that dogs have these complex emotional experiences?

LB: There are many things we can’t test for specifically (even if we’re doing things like putting dogs inside MRI machines), but since we have been living with dogs for thousands of years, we owe them the benefit of the doubt. Actually, talking to friends at the dog park can teach us a lot. That’s how Darwin did it; he collected stories, then amalgamated the stories into a theory. His stories about his dogs are wonderful and clearly anecdotal—really the equivalent of talking to dog park people.

CK: Modern life can be difficult for dogs; most have far too little to do, and few opportunities to express their true “doggishness” or funktionslust (a great German word you use—taking pleasure in what one does best). For many dogs, that would be running, sniffing, chasing and so forth. How can we give our dogs more of what they need?

LB: Most dog owners have the best of intentions, but realistically, can’t pack up their urban lives and move to the country, or get a second dog to provide their dog with a companion.

But going to a dog park and spending most of our time engaged with our phones—emailing, tweeting, posting to Facebook—and then going home and sitting in front of the TV (even if our dog’s sitting with us) isn’t good for either of us. Most of the things that will make our dog feel better are things that will help us feel better, too. Neither humans nor dogs are prepared for many aspects of contemporary life. We spend too much time indoors, seated, by ourselves. . How all of this has affected our canine companions, we still don’t know, but it can’t help but contribute to some of the issues we are seeing in dogs.

CK: Our own dogs are almost always with us; they come to the office, they get long hikes in the local parks and so forth. But when we take them up to the country, they seem to come alive; they’re different beings. It is amazing to see how they behave when they have free access to the outside. They rarely nap during the day, they’re always alert—they just seem more fulfilled.

LB: It’s the stimulation, and we all need that. Dogs who are not as motivated or curious about their environment may need less stimulation, but they still need some.

CK: Behaviorally, there are similarities in canine and human cognitive decline, you point out that in dogs, as in us, it can perhaps be offset by mental stimulation and a diet rich in antioxidants. (As a devoted crossword puzzler and blueberry lover, I was heartened to read this.) Any more thoughts on this?

LB: Avoiding the problems of an aging brain, or at least slowing the process, is really at the forefront of human medicine now, and we ought to be looking into that for other creatures. Adding a miniscule amount of blueberries to dog treats isn’t going to do it, however—that’s crazy. But if we need another reason to stimulate our dog’s minds, this is it.

Puzzles we can solve together are fun. I played hide-and-seek games with my dog—that was a great brainteaser. Talk about memory! He would always look first in the last place I hid. Clearly, he thought, She was behind the fridge the last time so she’s probably there this time, too.

CK: We do this with our three all the time, and what I find interesting is that they never seem to use their noses to find us.

LB:  I wonder if they may be “playing fair” with us, giving us a fighting chance. They might realize we’re so bad at this game, and know that if they use all their abilities, they would win all the time. End of game! No fun!

CK: People don’t seem to like complicated solutions, especially when it comes to dog training and behavior. We want to know the answer now. How do we accommodate that?

LB: I think it’s human nature to want answers, especially when we have an animal who is upset. It feels like life and death, and sometimes, it is; the stakes with this stuff are high. If a dog’s emotional problems manifest in aggression or make life too difficult and we can’t fix them, the dog can wind up at a shelter. People’s sense of urgency though can lead them to absolutes that don’t help them or their dogs.

I am hoping that this book helps people understand why helping dogs can be a little complicated and a lot rewarding. A dog’s social and emotional world isn’t as fixed as most people think it is, and on the positive side, a dog’s resiliency can work in our favor. Even though many dogs have every reason to not believe in the goodness of humans, they often do anyway, giving us chance after chance to help them. That is a magical, heartening thing.

For more insights, see the book review for Animal Madness.

If you think that having dogs who bounce off the walls is problematic for them and for you, you are not alone. “Wall bouncing” is one of the repetitive behaviors that have long been considered indicative of poor welfare and chronic stress in the animals performing them. Other repetitive behaviors that are commonly seen in dogs are pacing, circling and spinning, all of which are generally regarded as stereotypical behavior.

Stereotypical behaviors are those that are not just repetitive, but also pointless and occur because of deficits in animals’ housing situation that cause frustration. That is, when animals are performing stereotypies, they are exhibiting behavior that has no function, and doing it over and over because their living environment is inadequate to meet their needs. A recent study in the journal Physiology and Behavior called Repetitive behaviour in kennelled domestic dog: Stereotypical or not? explored whether all the repetitive behaviors observed in kennelled dogs are actually stereotypies. The reason this question matters is that if their repetitive behaviors are stereotypies, it suggests that animals’ welfare may be compromised, but if they are performing repetitive behaviors for other reasons, then that conclusion may be suspect.

The researchers studied 30 male German Shepherds who are fully trained Police Dogs in the UK and live in a kennel that can hold as many as 40 dogs. They studied their behavior as well as their cortisol profiles (which indicate stress) before and after veterinary exams. They found that all but two of the dogs performed repetitive behaviors, but that very few of them displayed stereotypies. Repetitive behaviors were most commonly induced by a dog and handler walking past the kennel and by witnessing food preparation, which supports the idea that repetitive behaviors are simply a response to situations of high arousal rather than to stress.

The dogs could be divided into four groups based on the pattern of their repetitive behavior and the eliciting stimuli. Twelve of the dogs only exhibited repetitive behavior in response to husbandry events (including veterinary care) or not at all and showed them in less than half of the observation period. Five additional dogs also only displayed repetitive behavior in those same contexts, but they showed it more than half of the time that they were observed. Eight dogs performed repetitive behaviors in response to husbandry and when a person walked by or stood outside their kennel. The last five dogs displayed repetitive behavior in the absence of these and other specific stimuli.

Though all the groups had similar baseline cortisol profiles, this last group had a cortisol profile following the exam that differed from the other groups. These dogs showed a decrease in cortisol immediately after the exam rather than the increase in cortisol seem in the other groups. This suggests one of two possibilities. One is that these dogs are under chronic stress and lack the physiological ability to respond typically to the additional stress of an exam. The other possibility is that these dogs are so attached to people, including their caregivers and the veterinarian, that being with them after a separation is such a positive experience that it balances out the stress of being removed from the kennel and examined.

The relationship between repetitive behaviors in dogs and their welfare status remains unclear, but this study suggests that there is not just one motivating factor behind the expression of repetitive behaviors. Many questions remain about repetitive behavior in dogs who are kenneled. Is it an indication of poor welfare? Could the repetitive behaviors be a result of reinforcement (food or attention) of these behaviors from people caring for the dogs? Why are the cortisol profiles different in dogs who exhibit repetitive behaviors without specific eliciting stimuli?