Melissa Starling

Increase in excited behaviours and decrease in stress-related behaviours the more reward-based dogs’ training is. No difference in optimism, though. #CSF2018

Playful dogs and their owners have lower hair cortisol. Do positive relationships unlock most health benefits of dog ownership? #CSF2018

Very cool automated scent detection setup for training dogs to detect invasive fish in New Zealand. #CSF2018

Dogs in New Zealand trained to detect invasive fish in waterways, showed high accuracy at very low concentrations of fish as well as correctly discriminating between target and non-target fish species. #CSF2018

Might dog domestication be a case of epigenetics? Friendly wolves allow pro-social interspecific behaviour, less stress, leads to higher oxytocin, enhancing social cooperation. May explain how the fox experiment progressed so fast. #CSF2018

Dogs trained to lie down rather than do demoed action, then asked to do it when they were lying down automatically. Demo becomes incidental. Dogs could do demoed action about 60% of time, but decline with 1-hr rest over 1-min. #CSF2018

What, where, when not enough for episodic memory. Add incidental information from the event. #CSF2018

DAID - when two objects present and switched, dogs match action with wrong object sometimes. Spatial information overrides object. #CSF2018

Do As I Do - is it imitation? Maybe if the action is copied - touch with nose or paw depending on whether human touches with nose or hand. #CSF2018

Lab beagles freeze or explore like normal dogs in novel situation. Freezers might be passive copers, but are the exploratory dogs active copers, or not experiencing a stressor in the first place? #CSF2018

How to train dogs to detect an invasive species that isn’t present yet? Dead bugs or bug extract in solvent? Either will work, but extract may be more effective. #CSF2018

Female dogs showed decrease in looking at owner after oxytocin and males showed increase. Also opposite effect has been reported! Need to get dosing right. #CSF2018

Maybe dogs were the only canids to be domesticated because of their suitability as social working partners. #CSF2018

Foxes would make better domestication candidates than wolves - less threat to humans. Why is it only dogs that have been domesticated? #CSF2018

Eye temperature thermometers are not accurate measures of core temp, but microchips with thermometers in them are good, and tympanic membrane temp is accurate when standard correction used. #CSF2018