Piss on it!

Or… how do you keep packs of African wild dogs inside an  unfenced boundary?

Today Scientific American reports on a unique kind of barrier being used to keep African wild dogs inside the reserves designed to protect them.

Over the past year, [Craig] Jackson, a biologist, and his colleagues working on the Northern Tuli Wild Dog Project, have shown that strategically placed urine—called Bio-Boundaries—can help restrict the movements of these notorious fence-breakers in order to keep the endangered canines on protected land. “The fact that we’ve been able to contain these dogs is amazing,” Jackson says.

Keeping wild dogs inside the boundaries of preserves is important for their safety as well as for the safety of domestic goats and other animals the dogs often prey on outside the reserves.  African wild dogs hunt in packs like their cousins the wolves.  And they are remarkably successful at it.

Compared with lions, which successfully kill just 20 percent of the animals they stalk, wild dogs have a hunting success rate ranging from 40 to 80 percent. That’s not always a good thing for an animal that must coexist with humans and their livestock.

The wild dogs’ success at hunting is surpassed only by ours.  Humans are the number one killer of wild dogs, reportedly directly responsible for as much as 60 percent of all deaths.  We’re also indirectly responsible for the large number of deaths caused by diseases like parvo, rabies and distemper that wild dogs catch from their domestic brothers.

So keeping wild dogs inside the boundaries of game parks is vital to maintaining viable populations.  But how does one keep a bright, wide-ranging, atheletic species confined to a large, unfenced area?  Well it turns out that strategically placed urine samples do the trick quite nicely. The Botswana Predator Conservation Trust (BPCT) is conducting research with the goal of identifying the signaling chemicals in African wild dog territorial scent marks. According to their website:

The aim is to identify the chemicals in the scent mark odour that are sending the territorial “No Trespassing” signal and to use them to make artificial territorial boundaries that will protect wild dog packs by keeping them within the safety of protected conservation areas.  [...]  African Wild Dogs, like nearly all mammals, send their social messages as complex mixtures of airborne organic chemicals, called semiochemicals. Wild dog packs stake out their hunting territories with patches of soil soaked with the urine of the pack’s alpha pair, and the odour of these scent marks tells neighbouring packs and itinerant dispersers “This area is occupied, no trespassing.”

BPCT’s goal is to use BioBoundaries to prevent human-wild dog conflicts.  And if they achieve their goal, parks won’t be the only areas where BioBoundaries area used.  Wild dog populations are in decline across Africa and problems with human predation and diseases spread by domestic dogs aren’t the only factors limiting their numbers.  As we’ve posted here before, wild dogs need to live in large packs and have access to interconnected ranges to survive as viable populations. They don’t just need room to hunt game – they also need safe migration corridors that allow populations to grow and mix.  BPCT hopes to use BioBoundaries to create genetic corridors between the healthy populations to allow genetic mixing to occur with minimal human intervention.

Smells like "No Tresspassing" to me

Will it work?  BioBoundaries are not an entirely new idea.  Semiochemicals have been used commercially for pest control decades.  According to SciAm:

In 1996 J. Weldon “Tico” McNutt, director of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust noticed that it took a pack of dogs six months to move into a territory in Okavango that was left empty after four packs there were wiped out by rabies. He speculated that long-lasting chemicals in their urine and feces discouraged the dogs from entering those former territories, but never had the opportunity to the put his theory to practice. After all, it would not make sense to disrupt the behavior of healthy dog populations, and smaller populations were all kept within fences.

Finally, in April 2008, after 18 dogs were moved by conservationists to Tuli from Marakele National Park in South Africa, McNutt had his chance and Jackson was tasked with maintaining the bio-boundary and monitoring the animals’ movements with GPS-equipped dog collars. The researchers have flown more than 500 scent marks to Tuli over the last year, and the dogs appear to be staying within the bounds of the fenceless reserve.

BPCT hopes to identify and synthesize key components in wild dog territorial scent.  They believe that using laboratory-made scents would be more practical than collecting urine in the field. (Though I can’t help but wonder if collecting scent might be one way to employ local humans and make at least a few of them happy to have wild dogs in their back yard.)  If the project is successful, in the future  BioBoundaries might be used to control other large predators and territorial species.

Perhaps someday they’ll have formulas we can use to keep pests like deer, rabbits and the neighbors dog out of our garden too.

Symbolic Understanding in Dogs

The use of symbols in communication has long been considered to be solely the domain of humans, great apes, cetaceans and a few bird species.  Human children typically start to understand basic vocal and gestural symbols at about a year of age.  By the time that most children are 2 to 3 years old, they are also able to understand the concepts of images and replicas.  As reported in Science News, a recent study demonstrated that dogs appear to be capable of a similar level of symbolic understanding.

Border collies quickly realize that their owners want them to fetch a toy from another room when shown a full-size or miniature replica of the desired item and given a command to “bring it here,” say biological psychologist Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and her colleagues. Even a photograph of a toy works with some dogs as a signal to fetch that toy from an unseen location, the researchers report in an upcoming issue of Developmental Science.

Three dogs already trained to fetch objects succeeded on both replica tasks right away. Two untrained dogs got the hang of replica requests after a bit of practice.

“The most reasonable interpretation of dogs’ success in the replica tasks is that they understood that by showing a replica, a human was trying to communicate something to them,” Kaminski says. Dogs evolved a feel for how people communicate as a result of living in human settlements for thousands of years, she proposes.

Earlier studies have found that chimps, dolphins and other nonhuman animals have great difficulty retrieving objects after being shown replicas of those objects, even after many trials.

Dogs appear to have an innate ability to understand human gestures and body language.  Chimps (like the famous Washoe) and African Grey Parrots (like Alex) have demonstrated the ability to be taught sign or spoken language. Now it appears that Dr. Bonnie Bergin’s idea that dogs can learn to recognize and respond appropriately to written word and symbol cues may have been ahead of its time.  Her “teaching dogs to read“ appears to be just a short step away from their now demonstrated ability to grasp the idea of images and replicas.

Coincidentally, I have been working with young Audie for a couple of months on these kins of exercises.  I’ve successfully taught him to search for, find and then bring me an item that matches one I’ve shown him.  We’ve done this with a wide range of objects (shoes, boots, metal bowls, pens, bumpers, spoons, business cards and more).  Sometimes the object I send him to find is in a different room.  Quite often I don’t know where it is (hence the need to have him find it).  Still, he gets it right nearly every time.

The question that arises from this is; are dogs innately capable of these kinds of symbolic learning skills or does the ability only arise from a certain degree of training?  I suspect it’s a combination of both.  SAR work (like explosive and narcotics detection work) takes advantage of a dog’s ability to use scent as a symbol for the object he’s seeking.  In Learning to Smell, Donald Wilson and Richard Stevenson propose that smells “are outcomes of highly synthetic, memory-dependent processing that is further modulated by expectation, context, and internal state”  and they compare the process of learning how to smell to that of learning how to read.

Perhaps the combination of being a neotenized, highly social, scent-reading species that co-evolved with humans and has an innate skill to observe and interpret our behavior makes dogs uniquely well-equipped for certain types of symbolic learning. How much are they able understand?  Well, since they’re poorly equipped to talk or sign back to us we’ll have to wait a while longer to find out.

I’ll try to shoot and upload some video of Audie and I working on the “match game” this week.

How Does Your Dog Smell?

No, I’m not blogging about canine olfactory processes. I’ll leave that to Ken over at Did a Cat Sh*t in Here. 

I’d like to talk about how you recognize and judge the scent of your four-legged friend.

Back in 2000, Queens University psychologists Deborah Wells and Peter Hepper published a study in Perception titled The discrimination of dog odours by humans.  The study examined the ability of humans to identify individual dogs by smell. From the abstract:

Most of the participants (88.5%) were able to recognise the odour of their own dog. They showed no significant bias, however, in responding which of the odours they thought smelt the strongest or most pleasant. The results indicate that dogs produce odours that are individually distinctive to their owners, and highlight the fact that humans can recognise members of another species using olfactory cues — an ability presumably acquired without conscious effort.

Even though the importance of our sense of smell has historically been grossly underestimated, we’ve known for some time that humans, like other mammals, can discriminate between kin and non‐kin by olfactory cues alone – so these findings shouldn’t be terribly surprising.  Still, after stumbling onto the abstract I was curious to know more.  Since the article is only available (at least to me) by paid subscription, I thought it was a wonderful stroke of luck that Scientific American published an article about it  just this week. Here’s their description of the study and an interesting side note on the results not included in the abstract:

In this study, twenty-six dog owners were given a blanket to place in their dog’s bed for a period of three consecutive nights. (One rule was that the dogs couldn’t be bathed for at least a month before the study began.) The owners then returned to the laboratory with this blanket, were blindfolded, and asked to take a deep whiff of two comparison blankets. One blanket was from their own dog’s bed and the other was from the bed of a foreign dog matched for age, sex, and (wherever possible) breed. Remarkably, 88.5% (23 of the 26 participants) correctly identified their own dog’s odor—a finding that the authors attribute to familiarization. However, somewhat surprisingly, the study failed to show that owners preferred this particular smell over the other one.

So… pet owners can differentiate the scent of their dogs from those of strange dogs (which is, by the way, not the same thing as being able to identify our dogs by smell) – but we don’t necessarily preferour dogs’ odors. Why not?  Well first, as SciAm noted:

One possible reason for this null finding on the preference dimension may be that the study did not control for quality of attachment between the owner and his or her dog.

They probably also didn’t control for variations in personal or cultural attitudes toward odor or for factors affecting the general aesthetic quality of the odor of the dog (i.e., gingivitis, skin problems, flatulence, ear infections etc.) Pheromones may be an important factor as well.  While we may recognize and/or be attracted to the body odors of potential mates and our offspring, it would make evolutionary sense that we wouldn’t necessarily respond positively to the pheromones or body odors of an animal of another species – even one that we care deeply for.

I enjoy the smells of my dogs (for the most part at least) and I’ve always been able to tell them apart by scent.  Just for you I very carefully and methodically smelled both my dogs about the head, shoulders and hips so I could report what they smell like.  Zip has a very soft, light, powdery (and very undoglike) scent with hints of lemon and ear wax.  This is her scent, not her shampoo – she hasn’t had a bath in several months (and no, I don’t use doggy colognes).  Audie has a much stronger, saltier scent with an earwax topnote and basenotes of intact boy dog urine and raw meat.  

I have to say that even though Audie is my darling mamma’s boy, I much prefer Zip’s scent to his.

Now Smell This

Our friend LabRat over at AtomicNerds wrote an excellent post a while back on why the mirror test for self-awareness may not be applicable to dogs – or bats.  Here’s a little sniff:

Personally, however, I’ve always had an issue with the test, because it depends rather heavily on something humans take for granted- vision as the dominant source of sensory information. The fact that dogs never pass the mirror test is something that is frequently mentioned in dog behavior literature as proof that dogs have no self-awareness, no conception of “I” and “you”, that they just learn from stimulus and response. It’s extremely important for humans to bear in mind that dogs don’t think or feel or remember the way humans do, but I really wonder first if a total absence of self-awareness is a logical assumption to make of a complex social animal, and second if the test is a fair measurement of an animal like a dog. (Or, for that matter, a horse or any other complex social animal that has failed the test but doesn’t put much reliance on its eyes compared to other senses.)

For a dog, smell is the ruling sense, the chief and most reliable source of information. Not only is the sense of smell of the average dog (let alone a hound) at least a hundred times more powerful than it is for humans, it’s gives them even more information than vision does for us, because scent is the only three-dimensional sense- it doesn’t just tell them what’s going on now, it also tells them what happened then. We can approximate it by taking clues from our vision and reasoning through them, but we can’t tell that someone was standing someplace an intermediate period of time ago (but is gone now) without going through that reasoning process and doing CSI tricks. For a dog, this is standard information, part of the way they hunt naturally.

There’s no doubt about it, in a dog’s world, scent is king.  Interested in new opportunities to share the fascinating world of scent with your dog? Tired of the same old routine of tracking and hide-and-seek?  How about a scratch and sniff book designed just for dogs?  Each page in “See Spot Smell” includes a word, picture, and smell that, according to the author, your dog will recognize.  Linking scent to reading skills? Wait – is this a ploy to incorporate olfactory learning into a program to teach dogs to read?

I don’t know.  Considering where our economy appears to be headed, if I’m going to spend a bunch of time doing scent work with my dog I don’t think I’ll waste it using pictures of cheese to teach him to read - I’m going to train me a MONEY DOG!

According to their press release:

Money Dog’s Dog-Training Money Scent teaches dog to recognize and find cash. Using dogs natural ability to recognize unique scents, this training scent turns the ordinary household pet into a money dog.  “Any dog” can detect training scents for deer, rabbits or pheasant. Now your dog can detect this training scent, and detect cash. Money Dog’s Dog-Training Money Scent is perfect for games with your dog, a new tracking and trailing job for your dog, or simply to find cash.

Dog training scents come in many different styles and scents, but Money Dog’s Dog-Training Money Scent is the only dog-training scent which uses real cash to produce the unique scent.  Each 4.0 ounce bottle contains an extract of genuine cash, and is re-sealable. Because the training scent is made from cash, the fluid is not for human or animal consumption.

Gen-you-win cash extract! How cool is that? Hmmm, I wonder… if my dog can’t learn to find money using the extract, can I reconstitute it and turn it back into cash?

A money dog sounds like just the ticket. But let’s see how my buddy Audie feels about the program.  I’ll get an appropriate book, a piece of cheese and some cash and we’ll see which one he’s interested in:

I present the problem

Audie considers the options

 

He makes his choice

...and shows me the money!

Common Odorants Not People- or Pet-Friendly

Today’s 60-Second Science podcast from Scientific American exposes some eye-opening information on the odorants added to products like detergents and air fresheners.  Apparently, the manufacturers of these products are not required to list all the ingredients in their them.  So — instead of listing all the odorant chemicals in the product, the labels often simply state that they contain a “mixture of perfume oils.”  Thanks FDA!

After hearing that many people reported feeling sick when exposed to strong scents in many of these products (count me in as one of those people – I DETEST artificial odorants), Dr. Anne Steinemann of University of Washington analyzed several of the products.  From SciAm:

According to her report in the journal Environmental Impact Assessment Review, plug-in air fresheners, scented sprays, dryer sheets and detergents all contained a mixture of volatile organic compounds.

(…) five out of the six products Steinemann tested emitted one or more so-called hazardous air pollutants, which are carcinogens determined to have no safe exposure level by the EPA.   While the study did not test for any human health risk from exposure to these chemicals, Steinemenn says the next time the air in the house smells stale, maybe you just open a window.

Medicinenet.com reported that:

Steinemann decided to do the study, she tells WebMD, after receiving more than 200 consumer complaints about side effects from fragranced products.

“I actually witnessed someone having a seizure when exposed to an air freshener,” she says. She picked six fragranced products — laundry detergent, fabric softener, dryer sheets, and air fresheners in solid, spray, and oil form.

In a laboratory, she put each product in an isolated space at room temperature. Then she analyzed the surrounding air for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — small molecules that evaporate from the surface of the product into the air. She used advanced methods called gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify the VOCs.

Thank you Dr. Steinemann for reminding my why I gave up fabric softeners and now make my own laundry detergent and air freshener spray.  Also big thanks to bff Audrey who made me a couple of batches of laundry detergent (one liquid and one dry), gave me a kit and some recipes and got me hooked on the best, cleanest — and cheapest — way to clean clothes.

MedHeadlines.com reports that:

In the current study of the six products, Steinmann found almost 100 different VOCs emitted by the products under scrutiny.  None of the products listed any of the toxic ingredients on their labels.  Of the six products, five of them emitted at least one carcinogenic substance classified as a “hazardous air pollutant” by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and for which there is no known safe level of exposure.

Of all the VOCs revealed in Steinmann’s analysis, 58 of them tested above the 300 micrograms per cubic meter mark, a level considered hazardous or toxic for them all, according to EPA standards.  The plug-in air freshener alone emitted more than 20 VOCs.  The product’s label listed these toxic VOCs as simply a “mixture of perfume oils.”

There are no regulations in the United States that require ingredients labels to list all substances used in the manufacture of personal care and grooming products, laundry products, and air fresheners.  The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires an ingredients list for cosmetics but no federal agency requires a list of the chemicals required to produce the fragrances the cosmetics or other products emit.

So, let’s get this straight.  If I am buying a personal care or grooming product, a laundry product, or an air freshener — the FDA doesn’t care what kind of toxic waste ingredients the manufacturer puts in it?  Lovely.

In a bit of unfortunate (for the manufacturer, Proctor & Gamble) timing, Febreze issued a PR release last week announcing their new “pet-friendly collection.”  The release states that:

Febreze, the leading line of home freshening products and a favorite among pooches and purrs, is extending its revolutionary Pet Odor Eliminator technology into a complete pet-friendly collection. Febreze Fabric Refresher and Air Effects Pet Odor Eliminator offerings will be joined this summer by Febreze Candles Pet Odor Eliminator and Febreze NOTICEables Pet Odor Eliminator, delivering breaths of fresh air to pet-loving homes across the country.

Unlike many air fresheners that just cover up pet odors with a heavy perfume, Febreze Pet Odor Eliminator products eliminate pet odors in the air while at the same time delivering a light, fresh scent. Febreze has come full circle with the entire line, now offering pet owners a wider array of tools to de-stink and freshen up, while maintaining a happy and healthy home for their furry loved ones.

Happy maybe.  Healthy — now that’s debatable.  Given the results of Dr. Steinemann’s research, I think I’ll either open my windows to blow bad odors out of my home, or I’ll use a home-made essential oil spray to cover them up.