Very grateful to Chris Snuggs for sending this on to me. As seen on the BoredBug website:
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They Told This Little Boy His Dog Was Going To Be Put Down. His Response STUNNED Them.
On Belker’s last day, Shane seemed calm, petting the old dog as if he understood that he was saying a last “goodbye”. Within minutes, Belker slipped peacefully away. Shane seemed to accept Belker’s transition without any difficulty or confusion.
They all sat together after Belker’s death, wondering aloud how sad it is that animals lives are shorter than humans. Shane, who had been listening quietly, spoke ”I know why! People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life, like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right?” The six-year-old continued, ”Well, dogs already know how to do that, so they don’t have to stay as long.”
A story about a Pit Bull that will touch the soul.
The Pit Bull dog breed gets a very bad press thanks to the despicable way that these dogs were associated with dog fighting many years ago. But take away man’s disgraceful involvement and most times you will find a gorgeous, loving dog.
We have a Pit Bull mix here at home.
Casey, at home; picture taken January, 2014.
He is the most wonderful of dogs.
Now read this article, as seen on Mother Nature Network.
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Rescued pit bull helps autistic teen open his heart
The first time Joey Granados gave his mother a kiss on the cheek was when they adopted Roxy.
The best part about Roxy and Joey’s friendship? No judgments. Just love. (Photo: Amanda Granados/Instagram)
Pit bulls often get a bad rap. So do kids with autism.
Both are misunderstood. But what happens when you put the two of them together? Magic.
Just ask Amanda Granados of Los Angeles. Her son, Joey, has autism. From an early age, Joey turned away from his mom’s hugs and kisses. He would not let his mom hold his hand. He preferred to be alone. According to his mom, Joey had a really difficult time adjusting in social situations.
But Joey has recently met a new friend that has opened up his heart to his mom and others in his world. That friend is Roxy, a goofy, loving pit bull who knows how it feels to have people look at you and think you are something you are not.
Fourteen-year-old Joey had been asking his mom for a dog for some time to help him deal with the loneliness of his life with autism. Just after Thanksgiving, Amanda was perusing the website for the local animal shelter when she came across Roxy’s picture and just knew that this would be a good match.
As Joey tells it, when he and his mom went down to the shelter to look at Roxy, the dog walked right passed Amanda and jumped on Joey’s lap. The two have been best friends ever since. And Roxy has opened up Joey’s world to the love and affection of others.
“I get emotional thinking about it,” Amanda Granados recently told “Today.” “For all those years, he wouldn’t hold my hand, he wouldn’t hug me — it was all part of the autism — but this dog has taught him how to give and show affection. He holds my hand now! He hugs me! The first time I got a kiss on the cheek was when Roxy came home.”
Joey told “Today” that Roxy has made it easier for him to give and receive affection.
“I didn’t have too many friends growing up, but then we got Roxy and I’ve been able to make friends ever since,” Joey said. “At home, I’ve been able to hold my mom’s hand, kiss her, hug her and do a lot of things that I hadn’t been able to do growing up.
“She’s opened up my heart.”
According to Amanda, the best part about the bond between Roxy and Joey is that there are no judgments. Just true friendship. And lots and lots of love.
Want to see this adorable pair in action? Check it out:
The way a dog focuses on the immediate task holds a very important lesson for us.
It’s a safe bet to claim that any dog owner has, from time to time, envied the way a dog so perfectly lives in the present. Then let’s not even go to the comparison between dogs and humans when it comes to relaxing!
Hazel taking a mid-morning break on Tuesday.
These opening thoughts were prompted by a recent article that was published on The Conversation. The article criticised, rightly in my opinion, the madness (my word) of how many of us live these days, and with particular respect to ‘multi-tasking’. It’s a sobering reminder of the value of letting go and is republished here within the terms of essays published on The Conversation.
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The value of unplugging in the Age of Distraction
July 7, 2015 4.59am EDT
Author: John Rennie Short – Professor, School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Small device, but very demanding. aciej_ie/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
A common experience: you are walking down the street and someone is walking in the opposite direction toward you. You see him but he does not see you. He is texting or looking at his cellphone. He is distracted, trying to do two things at the same time, walking and communicating.
There is also the telltale recognition of a car driver on a phone; she’s driving either too slowly or too fast for the surrounding conditions, only partly connected to what is going on around her. Connected to someone else in another place, she is not present in the here and now.
These types of occurrences are now common enough that we can label our time as the age of distraction.
A dangerous condition
The age of distraction is dangerous. A recent report by the National Safety Council showed that walking while texting increases the risk of accidents. More than 11,000 people were injured last year while walking and talking on their phones.
Really bad idea: texting while driving. Paul Oka/flickr, CC BY-NC
Even more dangerous is the distracted car driver. Distracted drivers have more fluctuating speed, change lanes fewer times than is necessary and in general make driving for everyone less safe and less efficient.
Texting while driving resulted in 16,000 additional road fatalities from 2001 to 2007. More than 21% of vehicle accidents are now attributable to drivers talking on cellphones and another 5% were text messaging.
Cognitive impairment
Multitasking relatively complex functions, such as operating handheld devices to communicate while walking or driving, is not so much an efficient use of our time as a suboptimal use of our skills.
We are more efficient users of information when we concentrate on one task at a time. When we try to do more than one thing, we suffer from inattention blindness, which is failing to recognize other things, such as people walking toward us or other road users.
Digital devices, which are proliferating in our lives, encourage multitasking, but does this really help our performance? Thomas Hawk/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
Multitaskers do worse on standard tests of pattern recognition and memory recall. In a now classic study, researchers at Stanford University found that multitaskers were less efficient because they were more susceptible to using irrelevant information and drawing on inappropriate memories.
Multitasking may not be all that good for you either. A 2010 survey of over 2,000 8- to 12-year-old girls in the US and Canada found that media multitasking was associated with negative social indicators, while face-to-face contact was associated with more positive social indicators such as social success, feelings of normalcy and hours of sleep (vital for young people).
Although the causal mechanism has yet to be fully understood – that is, what causes what – the conclusion is that media multitasking is not a source of happiness.
Distraction-seeking creatures?
There are a number of reasons behind this growing distraction.
One often-cited reason is the pressure of time. There is less time to accomplish all that we need to do. Multitasking then is the result of the pressure to do more things in the same limited time. But numerous studies point to the discretionary use of time among the more affluent, and especially more affluent men. The crunch of time varies by gender and class. And, paradoxically, it is less of an objective constraint for those who often articulate it most.
Although the time crunch is a reality, especially for many women and lower-income groups, the age of distraction is not simply a result of a time crunch. It may also reflect another form of being. We need to reconsider what it means to be human, not as continuous thought-bearing and task-completing beings but as distraction-seeking creatures that want to escape the bonds of the here-and-nowness with the constant allure of someone and somewhere else.
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asserts that our sense of time has been warped into a frenzied present tense of what he calls “digiphrenia,” the social media-created effect of being in multiple places and more than one self all at once.
There is also something sadder at work. The constant messaging, emailing and cellphoning, especially in public places, may be less about communicating with the people on the other end as about signaling to those around that you are so busy or so important, so connected, that you exist in more than just the here and now, clearly a diminished state of just being.
There’s greater status in being highly connected and constantly communicating. This may explain why many people speak so loudly on their cellphones in public places.
Reactions
The age of distraction is so recent we have yet to fully grasp it. Sometimes art is a good mediator of the very new.
A video art installation by Siebren Verstag is entitled Neither There nor There. It consists of two screens. On one side a man sits looking at his phone; slowly his form loosens as pixels move to the adjacent screen and back again. The man’s form moves from screen to screen, in two places at one time but not fully in either.
One study that looked at the effect of banning cellphones in schools found that student achievement improved when cellphones were banned, with the greatest improvements accruing to lower-achieving students, who gained the equivalent of an additional hour of learning a week.
On many college campuses, faculty now have a closed-laptop policy after finding students would use their open laptops to skim their emails, surf the web and distract their neighbors. This was confirmed by studies that showed that students with open laptops learned less and could recall less than students with their laptops closed.
We are witnessing a cultural shift occurring with the banning of devices, cellphone usage being curtailed in certain public places and policies banning texting while driving. This is reactive. We also need a new proactive civic etiquette so that the distracted walker, driver and talker have to navigate new codes of public behaviors.
Many coffee stores in Australia, for example, do not allow people to order at the counter when they are on the cellphone, more golf clubs are banning the use of cellphones while on the course and it is illegal in 38 states in the US for novice drivers to use a cellphone while driving.
There is also the personal decision available to us all, one foreshadowed by writer and social critic Siegfried Kracauer, who lived from 1889 to 1966. In a newspaper article on the impact of modernity, first published in 1924, he complained of the constant stimulation, the advertising and the mass media that all conspired to create a “permanent receptivity” that prefigures our own predicament in a world of constant texting, messaging and cellphones.
One response, argued Kracauer, is to surrender yourself to the sofa and do nothing, in order to achieve a “kind of bliss that is almost unearthly.”
One radical response is to unplug and disconnect, live in the moment and concentrate on doing one important thing at a time. Try it for an hour, then for a day. You can even call your friends to tell them about your success – just not while walking or driving, or working on your computer screen or speaking loudly in a public place.
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Oh, did someone mention unplugging and disconnecting?
A colleague back in England was speaking to me recently about a series on BBC Television about forensics. The series is called Catching History’s Criminals: The Forensics Story.
Apparently, the third in the series Instruments of Murder (For UK readers the link is here.) included fire being used as a criminal act. That episode featured a dog named Gunner who was a fire forensics dog. To the surprise of both Jean and me, while we were very aware of the sniffer dogs used by the police in many countries, neither of us had previously been aware that dogs were used, at times, in the determination of the cause of fire.
Now listen to Nikki Harvey of Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service in this YouTube video:
Published on Jul 23, 2013
Trained from a puppy by his partner in crime and handler, Nikki Harvey, Reqs (pronounced Rex) qualified as Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service’s new fire investigation dog in April this year. At a special event on Monday (22 July) Reqs launched his Twitter account and demonstrated his skills at Longfield Training Centre, Stevenage.
The 22-month-old black Labrador is taking over responsibility for helping to investigate the cause of fires in Hertfordshire and surrounding counties. His predecessor, seven year old CC, will work alongside Reqs until he retires.
Richard Thake, Cabinet Member for Community Safety and Planning said: “The work that Reqs does is critical in assisting the Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service team and it plays an integral part in community fire safety. Reqs is exceptionally valuable and receives the same high degree of training that we afford all frontline fire personnel.”
From six months old Reqs was trained to sniff out traces of ignitable liquids such as petrol, white spirit and lighter fluid which can remain present even after the most severe fire. Fire investigation officers use Reqs to assist them in determining the cause and origin of fires – whether deliberate or accidental. At the event he proudly gave a demonstration of sniffing out accelerants in a house and a car, as well as riding on an Arial Ladder Platform (ALP) that reaches up to seven floors, can be used as a water tower to extinguish large fires, and forms a safe platform for working at height.
Hertfordshire’s Chief Fire Officer Roy Wilsher said: “Reqs helps out on serious and non-serious cases and knowing what starts a fire helps us enormously in getting important fire safety messages out to the public. We want to prevent fires and keep people safe and now that Reqs is on Twitter his followers will learn a lot of useful tips to prevent accidental fires.
“I use Twitter myself (@HertsFireChief) and social networking is a great way to spread our safety messages across Hertfordshire.”
Fire investigation dogs are used for their speed and accuracy and are proving very successful in their work. Reqs and CC have assisted in many high profile incidents including suicides, fatal fires, arson attacks and murder investigations.
Reqs’ handler, Nikki Harvey said: “We’ve been training together for nearly two years now, which has given us the opportunity to get to know each other and build up trust which is essential. Ongoing training is now part of Reqs’ daily routine and it’s important that he always enjoys the ‘game’. I’m really looking forward to putting Reqs’ new skills to use.”
Reqs is the third fire investigation dog for Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service and is sponsored by Hatfield based company Computacenter UK Ltd, who also sponsor CC and his predecessor Browza. Clare Rafferty, Head of Corporate Events, Computacenter (UK) Ltd said: “The Fire investigation dog is a valuable asset to the Fire and Rescue Service and we are yet again delighted to extend that sponsorship to Reqs who is very worthy of stepping into CC’s shoes.”
And to demonstrate that these wonderful dogs undertake these roles both sides of the “pond”, here is a video from Denver, Colorado:
Published on Feb 23, 2015
Victoria travels to Denver, Colorado to check in on experienced arson investigator Jerry Means and his third arson dog, Riley. Jerry shows Victoria how he continues to train Riley, visits his office at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and takes her to a burn building to demonstrate live fire and extended training for Riley. Part 1 of 2
All of which seems like a great nudge for me to republish a post from Learning from Dogs from September, 2012 that explained a little more about the incredible power of the dog’s nose! See you tomorrow.
It showed a dog dancing to music, or quite possibly, a dog scratching its back against a wall that someone had cleverly set to music. The video had been sent to me by Chris Gomez.
Then Dan, a brother to Chris, and a close personal friend of mine for 35+ years, sent me the following. This is in a different league to Saturday’s little video. This raises questions as to how the dog was trained to perform like this? How long did it take? What’s the story behind the display?
All I could discover, from the blog Sun Gazing was, “This dog dance was performed at The Open European Championships and totally blew the crowd away.”
Trust me, this is going to have you spellbound!
Enjoy!
If anyone can provide the answers to my earlier questions then Dan and I would love to hear from you.
When I first started writing Learning from Dogs, some six years ago this coming July 15th, I didn’t have a clue. Not a clue about how addictive it would become, how eventually it would motivate me to write a book of the same name as the blog (not yet published), and, above all, what a wonderful family feeling would develop. Not only between me and my followers but also, and just as importantly, from the many wonderful blogs that I follow in turn.
In a world that offers so many examples of everything that we don’t love, it’s a great pleasure to republish Val’s post, done so with her very kind permission. Thank you, Val.
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Love is the Bridge for Understanding – and Action
Posted on July 1, 2015 by Val Boyko
Diana over at Talk to Diana wrote a moving post today that has stayed with me. “He Deserves Better Than This” is about her father who has been in chronic back pain for years and has not received treatment to alleviate it. Diana decided that enough was enough and made several calls until she spoke to an administrator in the health service.
Diana’s intention was clear. “They know his medical history, but I wanted to tell them about the man who is my dad, who worked hard all his life, who deserves better than this; who deserves to live his last years with some enjoyment and quality of life.”
Wow.
Sometimes we let ourselves think that others have our best interests in mind… And we suffer in silence. It is up to us to ensure that they understand what our needs are and support us in getting them met. (Having a caring daughter as an advocate also helps!)
So, how do we make ourselves be seen, heard and understood?
Having a good argument doesn’t cut it. Bringing all the facts to the discussion won’t either. Getting angry could also backfire.
I believe that in Diana’s case, her passion and love for her father touched the goodness inside a fellow human being. The administrator wanted to help and she did. He gets treatment on Friday. Yeah!
Love is the bridge for understanding. It moves us from being “one of them” in the eyes of another to become “us” in our common humanity and caring.
Here’s an other story that touched me deeply. Daniel Gottlieb is a family therapist, psychologist and award winning radio host. Thiry years ago he survived a traumatic car accident. He is paralyzed from the neck down and gets around in a special wheelchair.
In his book The Wisdom We’re Born With he shares a personal story. While staying at a hotel on business, the manager approached him and said “I hope you are enjoying your stay”. As it turned out there had been several hurdles that he had had to overcome in order to find a room that was easily accessible and comfortable. He asked to meet with the manager the next day to go on a guided tour with him. The manager seemed sincerely interested.
Gottlieb then asked the manager “Who do you love most in the world?” The manager quickly responded “My daughter.” Gottlieb then said “Okay, could you do this before we meet tomorrow morning? Imagine your daughter is visiting your hotel…. and she is in a wheelchair.”
They did meet the next morning but there really was no need, the manager had already seen the obstacles and hurdles. He was eager for more input from Gottlieb so that he could make it right.
When we reach out with love, we touch the innate love and compassion in others. We come together in our common humanity and caring. We hear each other and understand. We are all connected by love.
And then we know what is to be done.
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Revealing my age, what comes immediately to mind after having read Val’s post is this song:
For reasons that I’m not entirely clear about I haven’t yet settled back into my planning routine for daily posts since our Internet service was restored.
A young Pharaoh already embracing contentment. September, 2003.
Sidney Bloch, who is Emeritus Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, recently published an essay over on the blogsite The Conversation. (Greatly recommended, by the way.)
His essay was about happiness versus contentment and certainly touched a few spots in this old Englishman’s psyche, contented as I am in this rural part of Oregon. However, until now I had never stopped to think about the difference between being happy and being contented.
So, I think you are going to enjoy Professor Bloch’s views, that now follow. His essay is republished, with permission, just as it was presented on The Conversation.
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Happiness is an illusion, here’s why you should seek contentment instead.
June 29, 2015 4.07pm EDT
Feeling content means having a deep-seated, abiding acceptance of oneself and one’s worth, together with a sense of self-fulfilment, meaning and purpose. James Theophane/Flickr, CC BY-SA
I want to share a personal view of what it is to be happy and how it differs from feeling content. Let me begin with a clinical story.
They met at a party; it was love at first sight just like one reads about in romantic novels. They married following an exhilarating courtship, and since they shared an eagerness to raise a family, Jennifer soon announced the joyful news of her pregnancy. They called their baby Annie after Adam’s late mother.
They felt blessed; every moment since their first encounter had been nothing but pleasurable. Everyone who knew them concurred that their lives as a couple had been replete with happiness.
Tragically, it was not to endure. Their first setback occurred only days after Annie’s birth. She was sleeping fitfully and her colic stubbornly persisted. Jennifer felt utterly demoralised as a new mother. Her mounting sense of guilt and melancholy led to her admission to a psychiatric ward (her first ever encounter with psychiatry); the fear of her harming Annie or herself spread through the family and circle of friends.
And then, quite shockingly, despite the most diligent medical and nursing care, Jennifer met her death after jumping off a second floor balcony. Her family and friends plunged into deep grief; the medical professionals who had looked after her were similarly bereft.
An elusive goal
Having worked as a psychiatrist for over four decades and got to know dozens of men, women, and children of diverse backgrounds and with unique life stories, I have witnessed many a sad narrative, although suicide has mercifully been a rare event.
These experiences, in tandem with a lifelong fascination with what makes people tick, have led me most reluctantly to the judgement that while we may savour happiness episodically, it will invariably be disrupted by unwelcome negative feelings. Still, most of humankind will continue to harbour the expectation of living happily and remain oblivious that this wishful fantasy is an unconscious way of warding off the threat of psychic pain.
Rather than confront and demoralise those who have sought my help, I have gently but honestly responded to their plaintive yearning (“all I want is just to be happy”), by highlighting an inherent human sentiment. Namely that clinging to the fiction of being able to avoid suffering and enjoying a continuing state of pleasure is tantamount to self-deception.
I have offered them the hope – but not a guarantee – that they have the potential to lead a more fulfilling life than hitherto by participating in a challenging, and at times even distressing process of self-exploration whose purpose is to enhance self understanding and acceptance of the reality-bound emotional state I call contentment.
You may retort: “But you treat people who are miserable, pessimistic and self-deprecating, surely you must be hopelessly biased.” I would readily understand your reaction but suggest that all of us, not just those in treatment, crave happiness and are repeatedly frustrated by its elusiveness.
Most of humankind continues to harbour the expectation of living happily and remains oblivious that this wishful fantasy is an unconscious way of warding off the threat of psychic pain. Kate Ter Haar/Flickr, CC BY-SA
As the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud emphasised in his 1930 essay, Civilization and Its Discontents, we are much more vulnerable to unhappiness than its opposite. That’s because we are constantly threatened by three forces: the fragility of our physical self, “doomed” by ageing and disease; the external world, with its potential to destroy us (through floods, fires, storms and earthquakes, for example); and our unpredictably complicated relationships with other people (regarded by Freud as the most painful source of unhappiness).
So, am I simply a misanthrope? I hope not but I am inclined to agree with Elbert Hubbard, the American artist and philosopher, who said, “Life is just one damn thing after another“.
We only have to think about the 50 million people who are currently displaced and unlikely to find a secure haven anytime soon, or the 2.2 billion people – including millions of children – who live on less than US$2 a day to appreciate the validity of that remark.
A better option
Given the formidable obstacles to chasing after happiness or promoting its sustainability if we are lucky enough to come by it, what options do human beings have? I have not come across any meaningful approach to this question, even from the unswervingly confident proponents of the contemporary school of positive psychology.
So, I espouse the following: given that we have the means to distinguish between happiness and contentment, we can examine how they differ and, in so doing, identify an alternative to the futile pursuit of happiness.
Happiness, derived from the Norse word hap, means luck or chance; the phrase happy-go-lucky illustrates the association. Many Indo-European languages similarly conflate the feeling of happiness and luck. Glück in German, for instance, can be translated as either happiness or chance, while eftihia, the Greek word for happiness, is derived from ef, meaning good, and tixi, luck or chance.
Thus, a mother may have the good fortune to feel ecstatic when responding to her infant’s playfulness, only to see it evaporate a couple of years later and be replaced by the initial features of autism. In the story we started this article with, Jennifer may have persevered had her baby slept peacefully and not been assailed by colicky pain in her first few weeks of life.
Contentment is derived from the Latin contentus and usually translated as satisfied. No multiple meanings here to confuse us. In my view, feeling content refers to a deep-seated, abiding acceptance of one’s self and one’s worth together with a sense of self-fulfilment, meaning and purpose.
And, most critically, these assets are valued and nurtured whatever the circumstances, or even especially when they are distressing or depressing.I have had the privilege of knowing men and women who suffered grievously as children in the ghettoes and concentration camps of Nazi Europe but emerged from their nightmare to face the challenge of seeking strengths, emotional and spiritual, within themselves. With the passage of time, many succeeded in achieving a sense of deep-seated contentment.
What these survivors have clearly demonstrated is that accepting and respecting oneself, coupled with determining what is personally meaningful, stand a greater chance of accomplishment, even if never completed, than a relentless and ultimately futile pursuit of happiness. What’s more, contentment has the potential to serve as a robust foundation upon which episodes of joy and pleasure can be experienced and cherished.
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I read the essay on The Conversation out aloud to Jeannie yesterday morning and we both found it a very wise and insightful reflection.
Seems to me that there’s another aspect of life that we could learn from our wonderful dogs!
The effect of familiarity on dog–human interactions.
Introduction
You will remember that a couple of weeks ago, Professor Marc Bekoff generously gave me permission to publish his essay Butts and Noses: Secrets and Lessons from Dog Parks. The essence of the essay being that dog parks are gold mines of information about the behavior of dogs and humans. (Post published by Marc Bekoff Ph.D. on May 16, 2015 in Animal Emotions.)
The good Professor then went on to say that I was free to republish any of his essays so long as the usual accreditations and links were provided. So yesterday, I started going through the many html links in his essay, that essay may be read here, looking for posts that would interest readers of Learning from Dogs.
Dogs and their human companions: The effect of familiarity on dog–human interactions
Andrea Kerepesi (a), Antal Dóka (a), Ádám Miklósi (b)
(a) Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
(b) MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Budapest, Hungary
It’s a very interesting piece of research. I’m going to include the Abstract in today’s post and recommend if anyone wants to read the full article that they do so here.
So here is the Abstract.
ABSTRACT
There are few quantitative examinations of the extent to which dogs discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar persons. In our study we have investigated whether dogs show differential behaviour towards humans of different degrees of familiarity (owner, familiar person, unfamiliar person). Dogs and humans were observed in eight test situations: (1) Three-way strange situation test, (2) Calling in from food, (3) Obedience test, (4) Walking away, (5) Threatening approach, (6) Playful interaction, (7) Food inhibition test and (8) Manipulation of the dog’s body.
Dogs distinguished between the owner and the two other test partners in those tests which involved separation from the owner (Test 1, 4), were aversive for the dog (Test 5) or involved playing interac- tion (Test 6). Our results revealed that the owner cannot be replaced by a familiar person in situations provoking elevated anxiety and fear.
In contrasts, dogs did not discriminate between the owner and the familiar person in those tests that were based on obedient behaviour or behaviour towards an assertive person (Tests 2, 3, 7 and 8). Dogs’ former training experience reduced the difference between their behaviour towards the owner and the familiar person in situations requiring obedience but it did not mask it totally. The dogs’ behaviour towards each of the humans participating in the tests was consistent all over the test series.
In summary, dogs discriminated between their owner and the unfamiliar person and always preferred the owner to the unfamiliar person. However, the discrimination between the owner and the familiar person is context-specific.
This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Canine Behavior.
Learning from Dogs 