#20: We Bet Your Dog’s Never Tried This at a Drive-Thru
Keep scrolling for that wild viral video, our take on the woman who can smell Parkinson’s, a special word search, and so much more!
A Note About Substack
This week we published an article for paid subscribers about Christie’s changing relationship with her dogs. We also started a thread for April in the paid subscriber chat, so feel free to respond to the prompt and/or let us know if you want to be a part of this month’s office hours. If you want to keep seeing content from TOC, the best way to support our community is to subscribe to this substack ($8/month - a cup of fancy coffee these days). PS: We do celebrate each time someone subscribes and work to get you your money’s worth.
Training Tip of the Week: ‘Management can be … low lift, high impact’
This week we loved Juliana DeWillems’s reel about a change she made on her patio that reduced her dog Lola’s barking exponentially. In the video, Juliana goes full DIY goddess and measures and cuts these panels that look like plants and then hangs them along the railing of her patio to block Lola’s view. Juliana wrote in the caption, “This new barrier on our deck has reduced Lola’s barking almost 100%—a similar improvement we saw with window film, too. It helps she’s going deaf so sounds don’t set her off 😅 But even if she still barked at noises, eliminating visual triggers is way better than nothing!” Changing the environment to essentially eliminate the problem behavior is not cheating – it’s smart! (Juliana also wrote a whole book with management tips!)
TOC’s Take: Viral Video
Can you even imagine if you saw this?! I hope the universe smiles upon me, and I am held up by a small creature picking up a snack in a drive-thru line one day. I have zero additional information, but I’d wager that this raccoon has been here before based on how fluent all the behaviors look – walk towards the drive-thru window, check for cars, stand still below the window, and then grab the donut when the person holds it out. I’d guess that the donut shop was already a valuable location, and the raccoon had been reinforced for approaching in the past with little morsels of food left on the ground or in trash bins. Maybe one day, the person working the drive-thru noticed the raccoon near the window and offered them a donut, and that was all it took. Alas, these are all just guesses, but I can trust that the little racoon is simply doing what has worked in the past under similar conditions.
Community Corner: Word Search!
Did you have a chance to read our article last week for paid subscribers that defined the dog behavior terms we use so we’re all on the same page? If you’re still not a paid subscriber, now’s your chance to win a year of free access by being the first to DM or email us your completed word search. If you win and you already subscribe, you can pick a friend we will enroll for free.
DIY This For Your Dog
Spring is here and in DC it was 80 degrees last weekend. We didn’t realize that dog popsicles are a serious pinterest trend. Have yall DIYed popsicles with your dog? Please share any recipes you like in the comments. We like to keep things simple, so we also found these frozen kong ideas. PS: Before you make something new for your dog to eat, you may want to consult with your vet.
Bulletin Board: Christie’s on This Panel Next Week
Christie is speaking on a free panel on April 10 from 6-7:30 pm Eastern as part of the The Applied Animal Behavior Special Interest Group of the Association for Behavior Analysis International. According to this post that Kiki Yablon shared, “This panel will be moderated by our Secretary, Stephanie Keesey-Phelan, and will include four esteemed colleagues in the field: two researchers in AAB: Dr. Mindy Waite, and Dr. Katie Kalafut and two practitioners in AAB: Kiki Yablon, and [our very own] Christie Catan (@tailsofconnection). The panel will focus on providing attendees an opportunity to learn about what goes into formulating a research question and carrying out a research study, and what kinds of applied questions are coming up most for practitioners that are in need of further study. Here’s the link to register.
One Last Thing: This Woman Can Smell Parkinson’s
This week we were enthralled by the story of Joy Milne who can smell Parkinson’s disease. According to the Telegraph, “Former nurse Joy Milne had long used her hyper-sensitive nose to identify the ailments of patients, but even she couldn’t have known that a change in scent she detected in her husband years before his diagnosis was a sign of Parkinson’s – or that, by teaming up with chemist Professor Perdita Barran, she would make a staggering scientific breakthrough that offers hope of early detection of this disease and others.” You’re definitely going to want to learn more about Joy’s story and her work with Professor Barran. NPR has a fascinating podcast all about it. Interestingly, according to The Telegraph, “Barran is also about to publish a paper about her work with Dr Claire Guest at Medical Detection Dogs, who trains dogs to detect the olfactory signals of cancer and, now, Parkinson’s. “The best dog, a golden retriever and Labrador cross called Peanut, was about as good as Joy,” says Barran. Guest explains, “The learnings from the study we hope to apply to artificial intelligence and electronic noses in the future.”’ We’ve talked extensively about the power of our dogs’ noses in the past, and one of the most astounding stats that we like to share is at the beginning of this article in Woodbury Magazine: “Dogs possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in humans. And the part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours.”
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