Some time ago, I wrote an article titled Pass It On, Redirected Aggression in Cats and Dogs.  In that article, I wrote: “Redirection of a behavior is one of three forms of conflict behavior seen in animals, and humans.  The other two forms of conflict behavior are “approach-withdraw” and “displacement behavior,” which I’ll discuss in future blog entries.”  But I never did… so let’s talk about the other two now.

The example that I gave in that earlier blog was: “(conflict) behaviors are methods for resolving internal conflicts: a hungry dog, faced with a bowl of food and an aggressive canine owner of the food might express any of these three ways of resolving a conflict between approaching for food and fleeing the aggressive owner of the food.”  Another example might be a dog which has been severely frightened.  One of the ways of resolving this internal conflict in drives and motivation, in fact physiological and neurological demands, is familiar to most of us: approach-withdraw, or “flight or fight” as it is commonly, but incorrectly, called.  The other, like redirected behavior, is less well known, the least well known and often the most confusing option: displacement behavior.

Flight or fight: I guess “flight” is ok as a term: dogs and cats don’t actually take flight, but the use of the term “flight” to mean a hurried departure is quite correct.  Animals, including humans, placed into a conflict situation, will often attempt to resolve that conflict through a sudden, almost desperate, withdrawal, a “flight” from the conflict, or by a sudden, again almost desperate and totally out of character, attack or “fight”.  Thus, one example of an “aggressive” dog.  Is this an aggressive dog?  Sure, by the strict definition of aggression, a dog approaching a person or other dog, clearly behaving in such a way as to drive away or remove that person or dog.  But what is also important, in establishing risk or in treating the aggressive behavior, is the motivation: if this is a conflict-resolution behavior, that tells me something much different than if I can establish that it is a habit, a learned behavior, a genetic trait, a function of early deprivation, or any of the other myriads of possible causes and triggers for aggression.

One characteristic of this approach-withdraw behavior that I often see in this behavior is perseveration: the animal (and I know a few people like this) will run away, a little ways, stop, gain their nerve, begin to return and “fight”, lose their nerve, back away into a “flight”, and often hit a balance point, almost rocking back and forth in this conflict situation.

Another behavior that I have seen in these situations, and not one I recommend intentionally testing for, is when a dog in this conflict situation does attack, you can frequently turn the behavior off very quickly by simply shifting the behavior back over the balance point into a flight.  A loud “Hey!” in the face of such an attack has generated a sudden stop, turn, and run on more than one occasion.  The dog, and I have had cats like this too, was in a conflict situation, decided to attack (“fight”) but could easily be switched back to the flight decision by an increase in the scariness of the stimulus.  Again, not an effect that you want to count on, just in case it’s NOT conflict behavior, but it can save the day once in a while, and help you to explain what happened to your client.

How about the third form of conflict resolution, displacement behavior?  It’s an odd one, and more controversial as to its value and cause.  Perhaps you have been in a situation in which there is a conflict, some stress, a dog that is unsure of what it should do.  That dog’s body language signals will be in conflict, flicking from fearful and anxious to aggressive.  Suddenly, the dog will… urinate… or stop and eat a flower… or sit up and beg, or do some seemingly totally unrelated behavior.  This is displacement behavior, an outlet to the conflict.  We see it in humans all the time: some conflict, a disagreement at home among spouses, and suddenly one of them will jump up and light candles, or start to fold laundry.

The animal (or husband?) is in conflict and needs to resolve that conflict, and there are three ways of doing so: approach or withdraw from the stimulus perceived to be causing the conflict (“flight or fight”), redirecting behavior towards another target (often aggressively, in dogs and cats), or take your mind off it, by exhibiting a displacement behavior.  Watch for all three of these in the animals (husbands, wives, and kids count) in your life: your dog, your cat, animals at the dog park, or at the zoo.  Examples are common!  And maybe understanding these sometimes-puzzling behaviors can make our lives a little bit better, or at least a little less confusing.

An interesting paper appeared in a recent issue of Behavioural Processes (2009, vol. 82, pp. 355).  The author, William Helton from New Zealand, examined results from three published studies in which breed and head shape were reported, to answer the question of whether morphology (head shape, in this case) reflected intelligence in dogs.  Now, a little background because there a lot of caveats associated with this work.

First, what do we mean by head shape?  The classic measure of head shape, used here, is the cranial index.  This is the ratio of the width of the skull to the overall length of the skull, and can be easily measured with calipers.  But of course, this is only one possible way to measure a skull shape.  It turns out that dogs are interesting for this kind of question because, through our breeding, we have produced a wide range of head shapes, on a continuum of cranial indices.  So extremes in the cranial index values reveal dolichocephalic dogs (with a long cranium, the running dogs and sight hounds; think greyhound) and brachycephalic dogs (with a very wide cranium, bred for fighting and holding, grasping; think Staffordshire Bull Terriers) and in between, mesocephalic breeds, whose heads are less extreme in length or width.  So we can divide breeds into three parts of this continuum, or ask as the author did, whether dogs of extreme shapes, the breeds that are more specialized in their breeding, might have a lower or higher intelligence.  One hypothesis might be that medium-head-shape dogs, of less specialized duty (historically), might be less intelligent.

Another issue is, “what do we mean by intelligence, and how was it measured?”  A very good, and very difficult, question.  We really have VERY little data on the cognitive capabilities of breeds of dogs (or of course, of most species of animals).  But some work HAS been done on what might be one aspect of intelligence: trainability.  Now, while we have a few studies on this topic, among breeds, we still have very little.  But one way that has been used to “get at this question” has been to survey experienced dog owners, especially those with a broad exposure to breeds, to rank the PERCEIVED trainability of various breeds.  One good source of such information is obedience judges, and Coren has published these very consistent and repeatable results in a number of places.  So now we are no longer talking about intelligence, or even trainability, but perceived trainability… but it’s the best we’ve got, until we do more research!

So now, to the results of this work: what is the relationship between head shape, especially extremes of head shape, and ranking of perceived trainability (our stand-in for intelligence)?  Well, to a degree not accountable by simple chance, medium-head-shape dogs are perceived to be more trainable, and dogs with more extreme head shapes, whether long or wide, are perceived to be less trainable.

There are some other interesting findings to go with this main point.  For instance, what else does head shape tell us?  It turns out that the shape of the head also tells us a lot about the visual abilities of dog.  Breeds with long heads, associated with coursing or hunting by long-distance running, like greyhounds, have a retina designed with a wide area of receptivity: their vision is most acute in the horizontal and at the horizon.  Breeds with wide heads have their greatest receptivity in the center, like primates including us, and thus have their best vision in the center and close up.  So there are differences in the nervous system associated with head shape and there certainly could be differences in other facets of their brains and learning abilities.  Perhaps it is true that highly specialized breeds, so specialized that they LOOK different, might not have needed a broad intelligence to do their job, while your basic, unspecialized, medium-head-shape dog needed more wits to get the job(s) done!

Or perhaps this study tells us more about human perception.  Perhaps there is something in us that tells us that things that look different are (have to be?) different in other ways.  The answer lies in learning more about the actual intelligence, or at least the actual trainability, of dog breeds, a project that we at Companion Animal Solutions have begun, and that other ethologists around the world are undertaking.  The questions never end, and I hope that if you have questions, you will contact us here at Companion Animal Solutions.

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.

Let me give you a few examples: I think that they fall into four categories.  There are concepts that we now know simply are not true: Fixed Action Patterns fall into this category.  Fixed action patterns were a concept from the early days of ethology, mid-20th-century, in which animals were thought to display some behaviors that were absolutely of genetic origin, the classic “hard-wired” behaviors (another term we are trying to dump!).  When gull chicks saw a red dot on the parent’s bill, they “automatically” gaped their mouths open to get food.  The behavior was thought to be fixed or unchanging, burned into the animal’s brain pathways by their genes, and never to be changed or modified in any way.  But then we discovered that they could get better at it, quicker or more discriminating as they grew older: wait, that’s not genetic, that’s called learning!  So the behavior was NOT fixed.  Finally, the field concluded that there really was no such thing as a fixed action pattern.  We went through the usual struggle of dying concepts, modifying the concept to death, trying to keep it alive, before finally burying it and moving on.  But I still hear trainers referring to highly stereotyped, very ‘fixed’ behaviors performed in response to a clear signal as a Fixed Action Pattern, or at the very least, as being ‘hard-wired’, whereas we now know that there is no hard-wiring.  It immediately dates the user of the term to a certain generation and suggests a lack of later education in ethology!

There are concepts that are sort-of, basically true but that we now know are far more complicated, and thus the original terms and concepts simply don’t do the job any more: the Nature vs. Nurture dichotomy falls into this category (as do many dichotomies: the world is not a black and white place).  This issue is related to the concept of the fixed action pattern, but this one has taken longer to die.  Why?  It’s the caveat about being kinda, sorta right.  But here the point is that it is not a dichotomy.  No matter where we look, it’s a continuum, from highly genetically controlled (but never entirely: see point above) to virtually entirely environmental, what we in applied animal behavior would call ‘learned’, but again, never without a genetic component to the behavior.  So now we use terms like ‘genetic predispositions’ or ’strong learning component’ and really talk about these two ends of the continuum as explaining a proportion of the variability in a trait, a concept that is on a continuous, not a dichotomous, scale.

Another example of this continuum issue that I hear all the time is the question of whether dogs have a ‘dominance hierarchy’ (beyond the fact that most companion animal behaviorists are working with VERY old ideas about what a dominance hierarchy is: another blog topic altogether!).  So all dogs, individually, and all dog breeds, have to either possess (be influenced, include in their behavioral repertoire) a dominance-based form of social structure, or not.  Wolves have a dominance hierarchy-based social system and dogs do… or do not, depending on your point-of-view.  OK, first, the existence of dominance hierarchies in wolves (as well as numerous other species) varies on the basis of ecology, their lifestyle, prey, metabolic needs, etc.  So it’s not open-and-shut for wolves.  Now for dogs: the facts show clearly that the use of dominance, the importance of dominance hierachies in the life of, even the ABILITY to communicate such information, varies widely from breed to breed, due to our artificial selection of this, and more often, other related traits, like coat color, hair type, and temperament.  So it’s a continuum: for some breeds, social structure is VERY important; for others, it can influence their behavior; and for yet others, they can’t even recognize these signals.  A major disaster that we see regularly in metropolitan dog parks is when the first type meet the third type, without supervision: but again, perhaps a topic for another blog.  And the same goes for the common argument that while dogs may have social structure, they don’t include humans in their hierarchies… again, as an across-the-board claim, it’s clearly wrong.  Some breeds do, some breeds don’t.

Back to other old animal behavior concepts and terms: there are also concepts which were originally just that, only a concept, and for which we have never discovered a mechanism.  A nice idea, but without a mechanism, just not useful anymore.  These are often terms and concepts that describe a phenomenon functionally or descriptively but which have no mechanistic, explanatory power behind them: an example is Instinctive Drift.  Unfortunately, this term has led to a term more commonly used in applied animal behavior, Predatory Drift, based loosely on the idea of instinctive drift, descriptive of something that we see occur but without any mechanistic, useful purpose.  The same behavior can be more clearly and with a stronger empirical basis explained in other ways.

Another example of this phenomenon that I ran into recently is the “Hydraulic Model of Drives,” created in the mid-20th-century by the father of modern ethology, Konrad Lorenz.  It was actually called the Psycho-Hydraulic Model, and many believe that it was actually a little ethology joke: the description of his model was based on a European toilet system, a water closet (geeks are just SO funny!!).  But for a decade or two, it was tested as a model, but by the end of his career, in the ‘70’s, even Lorenz had abandoned it for more powerful models, models which fit the data that we were collecting.  So this model has taken its historic place, and certainly acted in a heuristic fashion to generate considerable discussion and much experimental work before being rejected in the end.  But it lives on in the literature and discussions of some dog trainers!

Finally, there are concepts that are simply made-up, never really true, often derived from wherever those old wives produce their tales: a classic example of this is the ‘alpha roll’ or ’scruffing’ of  dominant wolves towards their subordinates, and thus assumed by some trainers and veterinarians to be a useful concept in the domestic dog.  Domestic dogs are evolved directly from gray wolves: the evidence is quite clear on that now, but there is no such thing as alpha rolling, in wolves or domestic dogs… so why do some trainers keep using it?  It’s punishment, pure and simple.

So let’s kill some of these useless concepts and terms: Fixed Action Patterns, Nature vs Nurture and hard-wired behaviors, Predatory Drift, and the alpha roll.  Let’s get modern: pick up a good textbook in animal behavior… I have a great reading list available.  Don’t date yourself… we ethologists have come a long way in a relatively short time, and companion animal behaviorists have much to contribute to the modern science of ethology, but to do so, we have to stay up front with the science.  Contact me if you are interested in more ways to do this: if there is enough interest, I’ll write a future blog about it.

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.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.  These are sort of readings, both basic and applied, 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.

General Readings in Animal Behavior and Ethology: Textbooks
I have not listed years because there are many editions: the more recent, the better, but any will do.  These are the basic textbooks in animal behavior, with Alcock and Drickamer being the most advanced “serious” texts.  Klopfer’s book is a little different, taking a historical and personality approach to the basics of behavior.

Alcock, J.  Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach
Drickamer, L. et al.  Animal Behavior: Mechanisms, Ecology and Evolution
Goodenough, et al.  Perspectives on Animal Behavior
Maier, R.   Comparative Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary and Ecological Approach
Klopfer, P.:  An Introduction to Animal Behavior: Ethology’s First Century (a very readable introduction to the history of modern animal behavior)

Evolution
To understand modern animal behavior, you need to understand evolution, and these books will give you a great start to a huge scientific discipline.

Brackman, A.: A Delicate Arrangement
(a description of the relationship, or lack thereof, between  Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace)
Darwin, C.: The Origin of the Species
(the classic that started it all, not an easy read and not the best introduction to evolution as we now understand it: read it for the historical perspective)
Dawkins, R.: The Selfish Gene
(a wonderful and thought-provoking book about the implications of modern Darwinism)
Dennett, D.: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
(a very recent book by a philosopher of science about the deeper implications of Darwin’s view of evolution)
Gould, S.J.: (numerous collections of essays — sometimes controversial, always entertaining: take some of it with a grain of salt)
Stone, I.: The Origin
(an historical novel about Darwin’s life: a great introduction to his life and times)

Personal Accounts
I put these here to provide a very accessible introduction to how ethologists think and work.  Many of these have been best-sellers in the population literature, but all provide a glimpse into the world of the modern animal behaviorist.

Fossey, D.: Gorillas in the Mist
(one of “Leakey’s Women,” along with Goodall and Galdikas, this and the next two books illustrate the payoffs to patient, time-consuming field work and the risks of attempting to do science without training)
Galdika, B.: Reflections of Eden
(Leakey student’s study of orangs in Indonesia)
Goodall, J.: In the Shadow of Man
(Leakey student’s study of chimpanzees)
Heinrich, B.: Ravens in Winter
(fascinating and eccentric study of a difficult-to-study species)
Lorenz, K.: King Solomon’s Ring
(very readable insight into the early days of ethology, one of my most recommended readings in behavior)
Mowat, F.: Woman in the Mist
(a different, and more objective, view of Fossey’s work and life with gorillas)
Schaller, G.: Year of the Gorilla
(story of the early work with wild gorillas which laid the groundwork for Fossey)
Tinbergen, N.: Curious Naturalist
(the life and studies of one of the founders of ethology)
Wilson, E.O.: The Naturalist
(autobiography of the brilliant Harvard scientist who established the direction of much of behavior research for years to come: winner of several book awards)

Advanced
These are books that delve into the details.  These are more advanced, a little “thicker” than most of the books listed above (except maybe the textbooks), but these show you the details, and the future, of research and learning in animal behavior in general.

Axelrod, R.: Evolution of Cooperation
(very readable intro to game theory and the evolution of social behavior)
Lehner, P.: Handbook of Ethological Methods
(the bible for methodology in animal behavior research)
Mech, L.D.: The Wolf
(detailed report of a long-term wolf research program)
Poundstone, W.: Prisoner’s Dilemma
(a biography of an interesting character, John Von Neumann, who invented game theory, and the application of games to human behavior)
Wilson, E.O & B. Holldobler: The Ants
(the main resource on ant behavior: readable too!)
Wilson, E.O.: Insect Societies
(everything you wanted to know about ants, bees, and wasps, and probably more)
Wilson, E.O.: Sociobiology: A New Synthesis
(the book that started an entirely new field)

So that’s my reading list for general animal behavior… later, I will present a similar sort of list but more specifically directed at applied animal behavior, from both an academic and a popular view.  Feel free to leave me a comment if you have a favorite book to recommend, or a question about a book you’ve seen or read, or a specific topic in animal behavior for which you would like a reading recommendation.  Time to read!

I went to a place called Fido’s Farm with my Aussie named Conner: http://fidosfarm.com. We went for an “instinct test”. I had no idea what to expect since I know absolutely nothing about herding.

The instructor did a wonderful job of explaining what she was going to do with Conner and what to expect. She introduced the “flag” to him and explained to me how its used. Her timing was impeccable. She showed him the flag and when he did his typical Conner “yeah, so?”, she jiggled it. He took a step back and she took the flag away with a “gooood dog”. Lovely!

We went into the round pen and she had me hold Conner on leash. She walked over to the sheep and had the sheep follow her. I’ve never seen Conner so over the top for something (he’s a laid back guy). Then she told me to drop his leash. I was expecting him to crash into the sheep, send them flying, and then chase them around gripping their butts, but I dropped the leash and stepped back.

He went flying towards the sheep and then veered off to the right and began circling and barking. The instructor walked the sheep from one side of the pen to the other with Conner circling the entire time. I was AMAZED! I actually teared up for a minute. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She used the flag to get him to circle in the other direction. When one of the sheep ran away from the flock, Conner took off! It was like I could see a thought balloon over his head that said, “not on my watch you furry critter”! With zero training, my Aussie knew how to apply just enough pressure to bring a rogue sheep back to the flock appropriately. Again, I’m totally stunned. He opened his mouth near the sheep’s neck, but never bit down at all. This dog had never been trained to herd, he just knew how to do it instinctively.

All too often, we underestimate the power of genetics on a dog’s behavior. This can be a tricky subject because breed characteristics can lead to breed biases. Not all Aussies have herding instinct; it depends on their breeding lines, but the herding tendencies are prevalent. Not all pit bulls are dog aggressive, but that characteristic is certainly prevalent in that breed. Sadly, some of these characteristics don’t manifest themselves until a dog hits a certain age and by then, the owners are attached to the dog. Most often, we don’t know a dog’s genetic lineage. Sometimes we know a dog’s lineage, but we don’t know about the behavior issues or health issues inherited from the parents and passed onto the offspring. We often can’t keep track of a dog’s siblings to know whether what we’re seeing in a dog’s behavior is being influenced by genetics. So we do the responsible thing when working with client dogs, we take breed into consideration, but also look at the “whole” dog. We evaluate the dog’s living environment, critical developmental periods and learning/reinforcement histories.

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 ethologist), the answer for the cause for a behavior depends on the level at which you want an answer. Let’s start simple today, a higher, broader level of analysis. For an ethologist, behavior has two possible causes, and is most often caused by an interaction between these two: genes and the environment. This is the old nature/nurture controversy that we still occasionally see raise its head, but as we well know now, all behavior is, at some level, a result of both genetic predispositions and the effects of the environment. And when we say ‘effects of the environment’, we really mean learning: all of the behavior modification that has occurred through the learning that an animal has experienced throughout its lifetime. We know now, for instance, that for all animals, there are four types or forms of learning, and that every modification of behavior gained throughout the lifetime of an animal has happened through one of these four mechanisms. But the four forms of all learning is a topic for another blog: today I want to mention some new literature that once again points to the role of genetics in the behavior of our canine companions, and of course, suggests a similar role for genetics in the behavior of cats, parrots and even ourselves.

What color is your dog? The color of your dog can tell you something about the genetic predispositions for its behavior. Now, let’s be careful: I phrased that sentence with some thought. The color of your dog tells you something about predispositions for behavior, not the behavior of a specific animal. Why? Because, as we said above, the behavior of a specific animal is determined by both its genetic predispositions and the effects of its lifetime environment. This is why the extensive history that we take at each one of our clinical appointments are so important: that history, and every part of it, has had an influence on your pet. But likewise, the scientific evidence is quite clear that genetics is important too.

So what about color? Well, we all agree that color is genetically determined by genetics (not entirely, but largely) and we know that almost all genes control more than a single characteristic (in fact, each gene controls many characteristics), so the color of your dog can tell you something about its genetic code, and therefore, something about its genetic predispositions. Really? Yup, for instance, researchers just this past year showed quite clearly that, in Labradors, occurrence of problem behaviors like barking, chewing, and digging, were related to coat color: gold dogs showed significantly higher levels of these behaviors, even after numerous environmental factors were removed. This supports a 2001 study, in which researchers at Cornell University’s Veterinary Hospital showed that chocolate-colored Labradors were less likely to present with behavior problems than other Labradors, and that gold/yellow Labradors were significantly more likely to be reported with aggression problems.

How about other breeds? Well, there is very little research in applied animal behavior (anyone looking for a philanthropic opportunity?), but a study in 1996 showed that red or golden English cocker spaniels were more likely to show aggressive behavior than black ones. Interesting, huh?

And now, with the completion of the Dog Genome Project, we have a complete map of the domestic dog DNA. With this tool, we are rapidly gaining more information about the role of genetics, and genetic interaction with learning, in determining the cause of our dogs’ behavior.

I recently attended a conference of companion animal behavior practitioners and researchers, held in New Orleans this past March (see earlier blog entry). One of the most interesting, and most important, presentations at the three-day meeting was titled, “Assessing Behavior and Training Methods Using Physiological Measures.” This was a summary, and a very interesting demonstration, of the work by Nancy Williams, Peter Borchelt, Alice Moon-Fanelli, and Megan Bulloch that has suggested that heart rate, a relatively easy measurement in awake (ie, behaving!) animals, can provide insight into the activity of the brain.

The logic comes from some similar work in humans, and goes like this: good, healthy behavior is flexible behavior, that is, behavior which exhibits an appropriate selection of responses to stimuli, and that shifts as appropriate. This sort of behavior suggests that if a brain function known as inhibition is working properly: the dog or cat can turn behavior on and off.

The area of brain that is responsible for inhibition is connected to the heart via the vagal nerve, where it helps to control heart function. Heart rate variability (HRV) is the increase and decrease of heart rate in reaction to the changing environment, and HRV reflects the degree of inhibition that has developed in the brain. Thus, high HRV (a very responsive heart/brain) is good. Low HRV in humans is associated with increased mortality, and the likelihood of diabetes, depression and suicide, epilepsy, alcohol abuse, stress, panic disorders, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Thus, the brain is important in behavior and HRV is a way to monitor brain (inhibitory) functioning. Neat idea, huh?

So what are the findings: how is HRV and behavior associated in dogs? The work is only in its very earliest stages, but Dr. Williams and her colleagues have found that low HRV is associated with both aggressive and stress behaviors in dogs. She feels that by recording HRV in client dogs, we might gain a much stronger insight into the causes of problem behaviors, and ultimately, the effectiveness of our behavior modification tools. And with the advent of new tools for recording heart rate data, adapted from the sports and fitness business, like the $370 Polar Watch, we can record this kind of data in active animals under natural conditions. Don’t be surprised in the near future if we ask you for permission to fit your dog with a strap-on Polar Watch while we observe their behavior or expose them to behavior modification procedures!

I am sitting in the New Orleans International Airport, waiting for my (much delayed) flight to Atlanta (severe weather!), and on to home in Seattle. The purpose of my travel to the Big Easy, and specifically, to a small hotel with conference facilities in the French Quarter, was to attend something called the Interdisciplinary Forum for Applied Animal Behavior (IFAAB). IFAAB brings together, by invitation only, no more than 30 of the top Certified Applied Animal Behaviorists (CAABs) and Board-certified Veterinary Behaviorists in the country. Each attendee must make a presentation to their colleagues, presentations designed to stir up discussion and even dissension as much as simply being lectures on new discoveries. I have attended IFAAB in the past, in addition to more traditional meetings for a professional animal behaviorist with interests in both the research and clinical ends of our field. These more traditional meetings include 25 consecutive years of attending the meetings of the Animal Behavior Society (the certifying body for CAABs) as well as attendance at several meeting of the International Ethological Congress, the American Society of Primatologists, and others too numerous to count.

But the IFAAB meetings are different: animal behavior is a longstanding academic discipline dating back to Charles Darwin’s work and well before, but the clinical side is very new. Both CAAB and vet-board certification for behavior was established only in the 90’s, and to this day there are only about 50 of each in the country. There is very little research in applied animal behavior, and because of this, so much of what we do has had to be learned by trial-and-error (which is not necessarily a bad way to do it, just not always the most efficient or accurate), and handed down to new entrants in the field through avenues like IFAAB and the internship program that CAS is establishing with the University of Washington.

Given that much of what we have learned has been very personal, one-on-one, and very much in a vacuum, it is also not surprising that we don’t always agree on what it is we have learned. So these IFAAB meetings are always interesting: it is a group of people who realize that we all have a single-minded passion to help companion animals and their owners, and who have learned that they need each other and the knowledge that we have learned collectively. And yet, we come from a wide range of backgrounds, and as I have said, we have in some cases learned different things, different ways of accomplishing our task.

The upshot of this is that outsiders, newcomers or invited guests like equipment makers (we had a [very successful] inventor looking for new ideas at this meeting: fun!), always marvel at the degree to which we pound tables, argue, mutter, and disagree during the day-long presentations, and then all head to dinner together perfectly happily, supporting one another in the recent loss of a beloved herding dog, or the latest troubles with a teenager, all evening. It’s a fantastic meeting, an important opportunity to learn and to support each other. And a way to rationalize a little sunshine in March too!!

What did we discuss this year? Well, many of the topics will be showing up in blog entries here in the near future, but here’s a short list: the ability to train dogs to increase the variety in their behavioral repertoires, the effectiveness of new devices for cat environmental enrichment and dog leash control, several presentations on how to increase the amount, and improve the quality, of research in clinical animal behavior (one major factor: $$$ and how to raise funds), a new socialization program for fearful cats, competitive foraging in dogs, reading micro-expressions and what they tell us about emotional state in humans and dogs, assessing training techniques using heart rate, how the training of military and police dogs differs from pets, and the proper role of inhibition devices in training. Whew! And that still left time for the arguments.

So exhausted and ready to get home, but feeling reinvigorated about our field and the opportunities to help our clients, I await the call to board that delayed flight to Atlanta and on to home!

Most pet owners are familiar with the situation: your dog or cat is upset about something, perhaps has been challenged or even attacked. But rather than an understandable response in which the animal lashes out at the challenger, or turns and runs, it will turn and attack someone, or something, else. That is, it will exhibit an appropriate behavior but toward an inappropriate target.

In my house call cases, I frequently see this behavior in cats: they are frightened by a strange or new cat, and will turn and attack… the owner! This is frequently also the situation in inappropriate urination situations. The cat dislikes something about her litterbox, and urinates… in a different location.

In dogs, redirected behavior frequently manifests itself in social relationships. Dogs, more so than cats, have a social hierarchy, and if confronted by a more dominant animal, dogs will frequently redirect their aggressive response towards a different target, usually a dog lower on the social ladder. Some wags have suggested that this sort of behavior is frequently exhibited in the corporate world: passing the “aggression” right on down the corporate ladder.

But redirected aggression may exhibit itself in less obvious ways as well. A novel or escalating stress situation can be the trigger for redirected “aggression” towards objects, resulting in the destruction of shoes or furniture, which are unlikely to have elicited an attack themselves. It becomes very much a matter of “I know I am not supposed to growl or bark at that new baby, so I will tear up the sofa instead.”

Redirection of a behavior is one of three forms of conflict behavior seen in animals, and humans. The other two forms of conflict behavior are “approach-withdraw” and “displacement behavior,” which I’ll discuss in future blog entries. But all three of these behaviors are methods for resolving internal conflicts: a hungry dog, faced with a bowl of food and an aggressive canine owner of the food might express any of these three ways of resolving a conflict between approaching for food and fleeing the aggressive owner of the food.

The difficulty for pet owners, and specialists treating their pets, is recognizing redirected behavior. It is a frequent mystery when your dog turns and attacks you, or another member of your “pack” when you or they have done nothing to deserve it. Determining whether this is truly a change in behavior, a change in the relationship, or simply the sign of a redirected behavior is critical to the assessment and treatment of the situation. It frequently takes a skilled behavior observer to establish the difference.

Some situations are quite obvious: if your dog gets into a fight with another dog, and you intercede and get bitten by your own dog, this is an obvious case of redirected behavior: an appropriate behavior for the situation directed at an inappropriate target in the heat of the exchange.

But other situations are much more difficult to establish, like a situation that I saw in a behavior case. A cat named Milo (all names have been changed to protect the furry) was reported to have suddenly and without provocation begun chewing and tearing up curtains. The curtains had not been changed, nothing in the room had been changed, and Milo was in good health. Milo was housebroken, using a litterbox correctly, and had remained social with the owners and other cats in the house. Upon a lengthy investigation, it was discovered that another one of the cats in the house had recently been ill, had spent a night or two in the veterinary hospital, and had come home a day before the first curtain “attack.” The two cats had never interacted much but Milo hated visiting the vet, and when the sick cat came home smelling like the vet office, Milo started attacking the curtains instead of the cat. By using positive (food) counter-conditioning to reduce Milo’s anxiety, and therefore aggression, in the presence of the other cat, we eliminated the behavior within a few days.

So, being attentive to the possibility that a behavior might be a form of redirection is an important part of the behavioral assessment. It’s an obvious idea, the need to channel conflicting behaviors into something that is less dangerous, but in its myriad subtleties, it can be tricky to diagnose and treat.

Behind the Behavior: Information on ethology, animal behavior, and learning theory

Companion Animal Solutions is dedicated to helping owners experience the enjoyment they envisioned when they first adopted their best friend, be it dog, cat, or bird. We help owners modify their pet’s behavior using ethology, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. In today’s “whispering” world, its more critical than ever that scientists, behaviorists, veterinarians, and trainers bring sound, humane science to animal behavior modification. We hope this forum will support our ongoing mission of providing veterinarians, owners, and trainers with information and resources to engage in “Positive Behavior Modification for Family Pets”.