The Tell-Tale Hound

by the most excellent Louis Barabbas & the Bedlam Six

The dogs will need their own teevee

Because I don’t think we’re going to want to ‘watch’ the same things…

The UK Times reports that scientists at Japan’s Keio University are working on Smell-o-Vision technology:

The Japanese team adapted a Canon printer to squirt four “ingredient” scents and managed to get hints of mint, grapefruit, cinnamon, lavender, apple and vanilla, for a fraction of a second.

Something similar was developed in the US in the ’60s, with scents released from sachets hidden in the seats to make cinema audiences more engaged with the entertainment.

However, the smells took too long to clear the auditorium and they were scrapped.

I’m not sure that Smell-o-Vision’s going to be a big hit outside the dog world. Once advertisers get their grimy little paws on it, ads for cars, perfumes and fast food will hurl us into a continuous, headache-inducing state of olfactory overload.

And = I suspect that if real-life scents are pumped in crime dramas, film noir and Mike Rowe will lose a lot of their popularity!

Ready for movie night!

Can it feel good to feel bad?

We assume that, given the choice, a sane and healthy person will always prefer feeling good over feeling bad – but recent studies indicate that sometimes we may actually  seek to feel unpleasant emotions.

Do normal, healthy people ever really want to feel angry, frightened or sad?

Before you answer that question, keep in mind that you can want something either consciously or unconsciously. In other words, you may seek to feel a specific emotion whether you realize it or not.

Historically, most research on emotion has focused on how people (and other animals) modify their feelings, not why they do it. Maya Tamir bucked this trend in a 2009 study, What Do People Want to Feel and Why? Pleasure and Utility in Emotion Regulation  where she wrote:

People want to maximize immediate pleasure. Therefore, they want to feel pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones. The emphasis on short-term pleasure has dominated research on emotion regulation. However, people also want to maximize utility. Therefore, they may also want to feel emotions that are useful (not merely pleasurable) and avoid harmful ones. The approach that views emotion regulation as instrumental proposes that what people want to feel depends on both pleasure and utility. When immediate benefits (i.e., immediate pleasure) outweigh long-term benefits (i.e., delayed pleasure derived from successful goal pursuit), people should prefer pleasant emotions. When long-term benefits outweigh immediate ones, people should prefer useful emotions.

If this is true, when we’re in pursuit of a short-term goal we should just unconsciously seek to do the thing that makes us feel good in the moment. But when we’re chasing a goal that represents delayed reward we should seek the emotional state that is best suited to achieving that goal, even if it is an unpleasant emotion.

Tamir decided that situations where it would be most adaptive for people to seek to feel unpleasant emotions would provide the strongest test of her theory, because in these cases the immediate reward offered by pleasure would diametrically oppose the negative emotion favored by utility. She decided to test whether it was adaptive to feel angry when pursuing confrontational goals. Participants were asked to engage in anger-inducing activities before they played a confrontational game. Tamir found that this group who did this performed measurably better at the game than a control group who did not. She also observed that engaging in the same anger-inducing activities did not enhance participants’ performance in a separate nonconfrontational game.

After she found that anger could help a person achieve a confrontational goal she conducted a second test to find out whether people would seek to feel angry when they were told that they were preparing to engage in confrontational activities. Even though most participants stated that they expected anger-inducing activities to be unpleasant, they still actively preferred to engage in them when they were told that they were going to participate  in the confrontational game. Participants did not seek to engage in the same anger-inducing activities when they were told that they’d participate in a nonconfrontational game.

Feelings of fear should enhance performance in escape and avoidance activities, so another group of participants were told they’d be playing a computer game where their goal would be to avoid various threats. These subjects preferred to engage in fear-inducing activities before playing, and according to Tamir, “the more participants expected an activity to make them afraid, the more they wanted to engage in it before playing the threatening game.”

Though others have stated that negative emotions are the only ones that drive behavior, Tamir proposed that happiness should make us feel more cooperative. She tested this by telling some participants that they’d be engaging in negotiation activities with collaborative goals. These subjects displayed a marked preference to engage in  happiness-inducing activities before negotiating.

Tamir’s results are fascinating but we don’t (and can’t) always consciously choose how we want to feel because feelings related to expectations operate largely within unconscious mental processes. So how do we know which emotion will be the most useful in helping us achieve a given goal? Tamir thinks that we learn this with experience and she implies that context is important in this type of learning.

No one knows exactly how emotion affects behavior. The most widely accepted view is that emotion directly causes behavior, but some recent studies have proposed that rather than triggering behavior directly, conscious and unconscious emotions drive behavior through positive and negative feedback loops.

In an article published in Personality and Social Psychology Review in 2007, Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, C. Nathan DeWall and Liqing Zhang state that:

Conscious emotion commands attention and stimulates analysis, learning, and adaptation, often occurring in the aftermath of behavior and its outcomes. It may occasionally have a direct effect on behavior (for good or ill), but directly driving behavior is not its main function. Automatic affective responses can preserve the lessons and information from previous emotional experiences. The combination of previous emotional outcomes and current affect also contributes to making people start anticipating emotional outcomes — and to choose their actions according to the emotions they expect will ensue.

They go on to state that if positive and negative feedback loops are important in the emotional regulation of behavior, the anticipation of an emotion may be more important than the actual emotion. When we feel the way we expected to feel about an event our past learning is reinforced by the correlation. When we don’t feel the way we expected to, the emotional contrast causes us to update our mental database. If this is true, emotional expectations play a vital part of the learning process.

Baumeister et al.’s ideas on the role of our expectation of emotions in learning ties in well with Tamir’s theory of emotional priming. If we seek an unpleasant emotional state like anger or fear with the expectation that it will help us achieve a delayed goal, we may either be rewarded by a feeling of success when we achieve the goal or punished by the feeling of frustration when we don’t. While most of this expecting, comparing, rewarding and punishing goes on underneath our conscious intellectual radar, it still plays a key role in learning.

If emotional expectancies play a foundational role in how we perceive and understand the world, experiencing unpleasant emotions is a vital – and unavoidable – part of learning. It’s not just good to feel bad, it is absolutely and completely necessary to.

With the best of intentions, people often seek to protect their children, pets and other loved ones from any experience associated with negative emotions. We should, perhaps, reassess our goals in this area. If “negative” emotions are vital in controlling how complex animals (like people and dogs) achieve our goals, these “negative” emotions aren’t just necessary and adaptive – they are also (at least in some cases), the emotions that we prefer to feel in a given situation.

This is new, cutting edge, work so it may or may not hold up under further scrutiny, but it is certainly food for thought.

Beautiful and yet…

hauntingly cringe-inducing.
The latest in our series of videos on non-traditional agility.

Parkour, or l’art du déplacement, is a sport where one traverses existing found obstacles in the environment. The goal is to traverse between obstacles provided by surrounding structures as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This dog is beautifully strong and acrobatic – but I wonder how long he can do this before sustaining a crippling, or life-ending, injury…

October is…

Book month and adopt-a-dog month.

To celebrate we’re giving away three books donated by Hachette Book Group.

• How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend by the Monks of New Skete. One of the classic books on dog training and one I’ve recommended to many people. I agreed to do the give-away specifically because Hachette included this book in the group.
• Dog Tags by David Rosenfelt. Rosenfelt writes dog-themed legal-thrillers. I read very little fiction these days, so can’t offer any advice on this one. If you win the drawing and send a review, I’ll be glad to post it. 
• GoD and DoG by Wendy Francisco. I’m not a religious person, haven’t read the book and am not likely to – but the youtube video that inspired it recently generated a lot among my friends in the English Shepherd world so I thought it was appropriate to include it here.

If you’d like to enter the drawing leave a comment below. Make sure you include your real email address as that is how I’ll contact the winner. The winner will be chosen by a drawing to be conducted by the OddMan. Entries close Wednesday October 27, 2010.

The books will be sent to the winner directly by Hachette Book Group. I am receiving nothing  (other than a wee bit of blog-fodder) for posting this.

Have you evolved?

via The Guardian a dog waste bin in the Swiss canton of Bern.

A labrador oscillates at 4.3 hz

And a bear oscillates at 4 hz. They arrive at the point of dryness at the same time.

This sounds like the start of one of the many long and convoluted word problems I had to solve in graduate school but I found it in a press release. Today MIT’s Technology Review reports that a group of Georgia Institute of Technology students have created a simple mathematical model that helps describe how rapidly an animal needs to shake to dry its fur.

The group used high-speed videography, x-ray cinematography and particle tracking to study several different wet animals shaking themselves dry. The angular position of each animal’s shoulder skin was plotted as a function of time (producing a lovely series of sine waves) and the team calculated the conditions for water drop ejection by considering the balance of surface tension and centripetal forces on each drop.

They then developed a simple mathematical model to describe what they observed reasoning that water is bound to an animal by surface tension between the liquid and the hair. When the animal shakes, centripetal forces pull the water away. So to remove the water from its fur, the centripetal force an animal generates has to exceed the surface tension holding the water on.

The model indicated that shaking frequency was related to the shoulder radius of the animal with smaller animals needing to oscillate faster than large ones to dry themselves off. A mouse shakes at 27 Hz, a cat at 6 Hz and a bear at 4Hz. “Shake frequencies asymptotically approach 4Hz as animals grow in size,” they conclude.

Their model predicted that an animal’s shaking frequency should increase related to size with R^0.5 but the best fit for the data was when R^0.75. According to the press release:

Clearly, their model misses some important correction factor. Dickerson and co make one suggestion. In their model, the radius is the distance from the centre of the animal to its skin. Perhaps the fur makes a difference, they say in a video intended for the 2010 APS Gallery of Fluid Motion.

The video (which is excellent by the way but could not be embedded) is posted here and the original article here.

I think that the missing ‘looseness coeffecient’ is related to a combination the length and texture of an animal’s fur and the plasticity of its skin. And I suspect that the looseness of the skin is the more important factor. To test this I would find a group of dogs that had similar shoulder radii but different coat lengths and textures and different degrees of skin looseness. A largish beagle, a Shar-pei, a small labrador, an English bulldog, an American water spaniel, a Keeshond and a golden retriever would provide a nice data set for that experiment.

In a follow-up experiment I’d test the importance of surface adhesion factors like the texture and oiliness of the coat.

Love at first sight

“My Dog Zero,” released in 1992, was Joe Murray’s third independent film and his first color film. About the film he writes:

In 1991, I did an 11 minute indie film about a man’s quest to overcome high expectations when it came to finding a perfect canine companion. It was done on a shoestring budget, with students painting cels in exchange for food and coffee and a donated Iron camera stands that needed to be moved with a fork lift.

Here is a clip where Mildo decides a Dog is what he needs, and travels to the local Dog pound to pick out the perfect pet. You know how we always see pets resembling their owners? This is that scene.

It was love at first sight and Murray captures the scene in all of its wonderful and absurd delight.

I want a dog license

Dog licenses have been required in the United States since settlements were large enough to breed conflicts between neighbors. 

In his book “Pre-1900 Dog License Tags,” William J. Bone, D.V.M. wrote that dog licensing was first addressed in the U.S. during the 1700’s when several states passed laws desinged to control dogs and collect taxes to reimburse livestock owners for dog depredation. Dog licensing was first instituted in England at about the same time.

Of course dog catchers and dog pounds followed right on the heels of dog licenses, (though the first animal protection societies weren’t created until about a century later) and licensing provided revenue that helped support dog catching.

Back in the day, dog licenses cost money but they also sometimes offered certain priveleges and protections. According to Diane Bandy in Indiana Dog License History:

A dog who was licensed in Indiana, had certain privileges of running at large and escaping a death sentence imposed by officials. A dog who ran at large, licensed and not bothering livestock was also protected legally. If someone shot a licensed, non provoking dog, they could be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined anywhere from $5-$50 along with liabilities to the owner for injury or death.

Sadly, the idea of combining certain priveleges (running politely at large) with specified responsibilities  (staying out of trouble and wearing a tag that identifies you) did not gain much popularity. Over time, dog licenses became little more than a way to collect revenue and keep track of canine populations. And because license laws are notoriously difficult to enforce, scofflaws became the norm rather than the exception.

So much so that the national dog licensing system in Great Britain was abolished in 1987. According to a House of Commons Research Paper published in January of 1998:

The national dog licensing system, which was abolished in 1987, did nothing to contain the problems caused by irresponsible dog ownership since it had long ceased to command any public respect. Less than 50% of owners bothered to register. As a result, there is no evidence that the number of strays is higher since the abolition of dog licensing.

According to this article in today’s Star Tribune, thirteen years later some cities in Minnesota are following suit:

Are city dog licenses going the way of VCRs and film cameras? In an age when dogs sport name tags and personalized collars and have microchips injected between their shoulder blades, Golden Valley Police Chief Stacy Altonen thinks the answer is “yes.”

Next month the Golden Valley City Council is expected to drop a requirement that residents license their dogs, joining Plymouth, Minnetonka, Brooklyn Center, New Brighton, Falcon Heights and Northfield in the no-license category.

Altonen said the city is simply dropping an ordinance that wasn’t effective and that cost the city in staff time. Only about 600 dogs — a fraction of the canines residing in Golden Valley — were licensed each year.

A significant lack of compliance combined with the difficulty of enforcing license laws mean that dog licenses are becoming a net drain on finances in many areas. Advocates of licensing point out that license tags can provide a way to return lost pets to their owners but Altonen is quoted as saying that:

“In 17 years here, I can count on one hand the dogs we returned because of city tags. We return more dogs with microchips … or because people call right away when they lose their dogs so when we find them we know who lost them.”

Dog owners have historically been required to do little more than pay a fee and show proof of vaccination to license their pets. In exchange they’re received a shiny tag and a spot in the city database. Given the pathetic number of people who comply with license laws, most of us obviously see little value in that.

Why don’t dog licenses allow dog owners to do anything with their dogs?

A driver’s license gives you access to public roads. A concealed carry permit gives you the right to carry a handgun. But — someone who wants to drive a car or carry a concealed weapon has to pass a test to demonstrate at least a basic level of competence to earn that license.

Before you get your hackles up, I’ll say that I think that dropping the generic dog license requirement is a good thing. I don’t need a license to own a car, just to drive one on public roads. And I think that if municipalities want to institute revenue-generating programs that truly serve dog owners they need to reconsider what a dog license represents.

According to Merriam-Webster a license is:

1. the approval by someone in authority for the doing of something
2. the granting of power to perform various acts or duties
3. the right to act or move freely

Note that in all three cases a license is defined as granting the holder permission to do something. The problem with dog licenses is that they don’t function as “licenses” at all, they’re just an annual tax on dog ownership.

Dog licensing has become a way to collect revenue; a convenient tool to track data on pet ownership; and in some areas, a hammer to try to force compliance with vaccination, spay-neuter, breed-specific and other dog-related legislation. Since most people don’t license their dogs, I would assume that (despite what many try to tell us) these are not things most dog owers put a high value on. 

I don’t think I should need a license to own a dog. But I’d like to have the option of getting a dog license that functioned a lot like a driver’s license. To get it I’d take a written test to demonstrate basic knowledge of dog safety and dog-related laws and then my dog and I would take a skills test to demonstrate our ability to navigate the community in a safe and sane manner. If I demonstrated my ability and willingness to accept specific responsibilities and passed the test, I’d get a license that gave my dog and I certain privileges (such as on and off leash access to specified areas) that unlicensed dog owners do not have.

I want a dog license – but I want it to be license that says my dog and I have demonstrated that we’ve earned the right to hold it.

Hard workin’ dog

“It takes all kinds of dogs to make a world.”

For your Monday morning pleasure – a bit of vintage Sesame Street goodness.

“All I know how to do is take a hundred cows and teach ’em some manners.”

I love that the dog never says what breed he is. He’s probably a border collie but he could be a long-tailed Australian shepherd or an English shepherd – or a purpose bred mutt. He does, however, make a point of saying that he’s sure he’s not a show dog.