Eric Goebelbecker

Source:

A few months ago the Journal of Applied Animal Behaviour Science published an article titled Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors". Two of the researchers participated in the research regarding children and dog bites that I wrote about earlier, so I decided to plunk down my $31.50 and read it for myself.

It's hard to talk about, work with, or even think about dogs without broaching the topic of barking. Even the absence of barking is frequently noteworthy.

As a matter of fact barking can be a very big issue. The sort of issue can lead to dogs being rehomed or...worse. Coppinger and Feinstein ("Hark! hark! The dogs do bark ... and bark and bark"; Smithsonian 1991 - can't find a link.) once recorded a dog barking for seven hours straight.

Why do dogs bark? From an evolutionary context, that's a good question. While wolves and coyotes are capable of barking, it is very rare. Belyaev's famous foxes famously do, much like dogs. (Silver foxes normally do not bark very often.)

I can think of four main "types" for barks off the top of my head, and since that is exactly where this blog entry is coming from, those are the four I will list.

There are approximately 1 million dog bites each year in the United States. Between 60 and 70% of them are to children. (See this.) That's a pretty staggering statistic.

Why are a majority of bites to children? In 2007, three researchers attempted to address that question. They examined the records from three years of bite cases involving children from the Behavior Clinic of the Matthew J Ryan Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. They looked at 111 cases. (There were actually 145 cases, but they could not determine the age of the children in 34 of them so they were not included.) A few of the cases were repeat offenders; there were only 103 unique dogs in the study.

The numbers that grabbed my attention and lead me to purchase the paper were these:

There's a quiet battle going on the travel world right now. It's a conflict between the people who believe in the so-called natural phenomenon called "gravity" such as high school physics teachers, and the people who believe in air travel, like Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin companies.

Proponents of gravity believe that objects of mass attract one another and as a result, objects on or near the earth are irresistibly pulled toward it. Meanwhile, believers in air travel hold that one can enter a specially built craft and in defiance of gravity, fly in it to faraway destinations.

It appears that as more and more people use this "air travel" that gravity is failing our high school students.