Behind the Behavior

Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

Back in the fall of 2008, I presented a blog titled A Reading List in Animal Behavior, Part One. I went on in that article to say, “So here I present a highly personal reading list in ethology.  In this entry, I suggest some reading in basic ethology, and in a later entry, I will focus in readings in applied animal behavior.”

But it never happened.. no follow-up blog on the most relevant material, applied ethology!  So, forthwith, the rest of my list… the disclaimer, as before: this is a personal list.  These are the sort of readings, applied in this case, that I would, and have, “required of students of this field, beginning at the undergraduate level and right on through graduate or board-certification work in ethology.  These are the books that my students, graduate and undergraduate, read.  And these would provide the foundation for an excellent library in animal behavior.” Note: We’ve made book and DVD recommendations about dog behavior, cat behavior, and parrot behavior on the Companion Animal Solutions web site under the Books & DVDs section. For the books below, we’ve linked the titles of these books to places you can order them.

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James Ha, PhD, CAAB

I have expressed my concern about confrontational behavior modification techniques in earlier blogs: the use of “positive punishment” or dominance and pack theory-based techniques, especially in the hands of untrained users, has been shown to be ineffective and to produce negative side effects.  Hiby and colleagues demonstrated that positive reinforcement techniques produced a significantly better response to obedience tasks than did positive punishment techniques (see references below).  Blackwell and colleagues showed that dogs trained using positive reinforcement methods were less likely to exhibit later behavior problems while dogs trained using punishment were more likely to exhibit later fear-related behaviors (see references below).  These are just some examples: there is an expanding literature on the significantly greater effectiveness of positive reinforcement techniques as well as the lack of effectiveness of aversive or confrontational methods, methods which are related to incorrect ideas about the role of dominance and pack theory in dogs. (more…)

Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

The modern science of animal behavior, which we call ‘ethology’, has come a long way in the past few decades, from a largely observational, descriptive science to a modern, quantitative science based on solid foundations of evolutionary biology and quantitative methodology.  One of the most common situations in which I realize this is when I see, read, and hear old, out-dated animal behavior concepts and ideas and long-ago-rejected hypotheses used by pet animal behaviorists.  Many trainers and veterinarians received whatever animal behavior education they might have gotten long ago, and often have not stayed up to date.  As a professional and academic ethologist, I of course have the time and professional need to peruse the latest journals, read and review the latest textbooks, and make sure that my university courses are up-to-date.  But when I enter the world of companion animal behavior, I am often taken back to a time long, long ago, to terms presented even to me in my long-ago introductory courses as historical concepts, mistakes, or simplifications used only for pedagogical purposes. (more…)

Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

It’s been an interesting week.  Last Friday, a local trainer and colleague, Grisha Stewart of Ahimsa Dog Training contacted me to ask if I would discuss Cesar Millan’s techniques with a reporter from KOMO-TV here in Seattle. To see video of the piece broadcast by KOMO-TV, click here, or click on the image to the right. Millan was in town for a meet-and-greet and fundraiser for a local pet shelter.  I leaped at the chance, as the science that I do as an ethologist very much clashes with his approaches, and I have been working hard to get the word out to the public about the serious side effects of his techniques.

In our practice, we see MANY cases of dogs with severe aggression, and in performing our detailed background interviews and assessments, we find that the dog has gotten worse following treatment with behavior modification techniques similar to those of Millan’s, whether administered by the owner, based on what they think that they know of the methods, or administered by local trainers who use similar techniques.  These cases elegantly support what we already know from the science of animal behavior, called ethology.

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Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

Cats, like all mammals, are social creatures.  While cats are far less social than dogs, to think of cats as asocial is wrong.  The degree of social behavior and the ability of an individual to adapt to a changing social environment varies with species (certainly cats are less social than dogs), breed (Bengal cats are less social than domestic short-hairs), and individual personality.  Even individual personality is dependent on factors like genetics (or what we often call temperament) and learning or socialization.  So genetics play a big role, at the species, breed, and then individual level.

A recent study looked at how young cats reacted to familiar and unfamiliar people and to a novel object, and showed that the social personality of the father (genetics) as well as the degree of early socialization (learning) influenced the later degree of social stress in human interactions, but only the genetics influenced the (nonsocial) response to a novel object.  This is a nice example of the interaction between genetics and learning.  And of course, this is true of all mammals.

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Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

I am frequently asked about readings in animal behavior.  One of the nice things about practicing in a region like Seattle is that our audience is so well educated.  So not infrequently I have clients who want to learn more, want to read more about animal behavior.  Most often, they want to read more about what we call Applied Animal Behavior.  Applied animal behavior is the relatively new field which deals with the behavior (and misbehavior) of our companion animals based on a scientific approach that extends from the modern academic field of animal behavior, or ethology.  Ethology was historically based in Europe, and is a field of biology and psychology, that is, it is a sub-discipline of evolutionary biology.  The basic precepts of ethology are that behavior has a genetic, and thus evolutionary, basis, overlaid with environmental influences (learning and experience), that we can best learn about the behavior of animals by learning about the behavior of close and distant relatives in natural environments which allow the expression of species- (or in the case of dogs, breed)-typical behaviors.  It is an approach that traces its roots, like all the rest of modern biology, back to Darwin in the mid-1800’s, and one that has been revolutionized, again like many topics in biology, by the DNA/genetics revolution.  The mapping of the entire dog genome at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in recent years has begun to confirm the long-standing assumptions of ethology. (more…)

Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

So back to fishing the Keys: aquatic applied animal behavior in action!  In the Keys for a fishing-immersion, 50th birthday trip, I described the offshore trip in my last blog.  But what I was really looking forward to was the flats-fishing: two mornings, out before sunrise (ouch!), and in position on a 2-3 foot deep sand and grass flat, in a boat designed to float in less than 1 foot of water, watching for the characteristic changes in the surface of the water that revealed the movement and feeding of bonefish, tarpon, and sharks under the surface.  It’s a more subtle kind of fishing than offshore running-and-gunning for open-ocean species, and when a bonefish finally slurps that shrimp or lure and accelerates (more…)

Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

I just got back from a three week vacation in the Florida Keys. Even on vacation, I am involved in animal behavior. I grew up in the Keys and left there when I was about 14 years old, returned several times in the ‘70’s while I was in college on the East Coast, but in 2002, I had not returned since a brief visit in 1982. In 2002, with a wife and a nine year old son who had never seen Florida, much less the Keys, we returned, and we all fell in love (again, for me) with the string of 142 islands extending south of Miami to Key West, a mere 90 miles from Havana (130 miles from Miami!). It’s got a laid back Caribbean attitude, the feeling of small towns and islands (those who love the San Juan Islands will know what I mean: I get the same island (more…)

James Ha, PhD, CAAB

Here’s a question for all of you dog trainers (and that should be just about everyone who has a dog)… how often should you train a dog? Many of us in this business would, of course, say, “as often as possible… please!” But that is not quite what I mean: from a scientific point-of-view, what is the optimum frequency of dog training… once a day, once a week, once a month? Again, many of us would answer, “as frequently as possible, within the attention span of our dog.” But surprisingly perhaps, there is very little information in the scientific literature about the optimum frequency for training, especially for dogs.

A few trainers like Bailey (1995) and Abrantes (2000) have provided some guidelines, generally “from once (more…)

Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB

Behavior has many causes: this is a general statement that many people believe is true, and it often causes people to extend the conclusion to one that suggests that we can never understand behavior, that it will always remain a black-box mystery. But of course, as professional animal behaviorists, academic or clinical, some of us have set ourselves the goal of understanding the causes of, and therefore the modification of, just that behavior that seems so complex.

Of course, as is so often true, the answer that we see depends on the focus that we bring to the question. To a professional animal behaviorist (let’s use the more modern name for one who studies animal behavior: an (more…)