Theme Layout

Rightsidebar

Boxed or Wide or Framed

Theme Translation

Display Featured Slider

Yes

Featured Slider Styles

Display Grid Slider

No

Grid Slider Styles

Display Trending Posts

No

Display Author Bio

Display Instagram Footer

Dark or Light Style

Search This Blog
Do you Believe in Dog? (2018). Powered by Blogger.

Copyright Do You Believe in Dog (2018)

The content on Do You Believe in Dog? is copyrighted. If you are interested in using any content produced on Do You Believe in Dog? please email a request.

Strap line

It started when two canine scientists decide to become pen pals in an era of digital media...

Translate

Navigation Menu

All rights reserved
Do you believe in dog? 2016

Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

18 December 2012

'Tis the season to be Doggy, fa la la la laaaa...

'Tis the season to be Doggy, fa la la la laaaa...

Hey Julie,

 I absolutely LOVE Project: Play with your Dog study and how the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab are crowd sourcing using citizen science! I don't think a better way of contributing to scientific understanding can possibly exist! I look forward to hearing updates about how the research goes. I will certainly participate - next time we head to the river to play, we'll take our camera to get some video!

So you might have noticed the silly season of festivity has landed upon us... Assuming we live past Friday (and I really hope we do, because Friday is my birthday and I selfishly want the fun of a full birthday!) I thought I'd look at some ideas that might inspire gifts for the two- and four-legged doggy friends and family members in our life.


(source)
1. Read about a Dog

 I have been re-reading Inside of a Dog recently and thoroughly enjoying it (again). 

 This book would make a fantastic gift for anyone who would like to understand more about dogs, the science looking at dogs, how it all fits together and is relevant to our shared encounters with dogs.
(source)

 2. Give a Dog

After all those posts about the science of children and dogs I do think every child should have a dog. 

But make sure it's an appropriate dog. 
(source)

(source)
Not every household or child is suited to owning a real dog, but that can't stop you giving that special little person in your life a gorgeous handmade pooch! 
Here are some I fell in love with on Etsy.

(source)
(source)


3. Holiday with a dog
(source)
It's Summertime in Australia right now and my dogs love nothing more than coming away on holiday/vacation with us to the beach. What better way to show your dog you've enjoyed their company than to include them on your trip away?

 Winter escapes can be fun for dogs too!
(source)

It's easier than you might think to find pet-friendly accommodation in your favourite holiday destination. 

Just head to favourite online search engine and enter 'pet friendly accommodation *insert district name here*'. 
Alternatively just ask normal rental options if they'll allow you to bring a 4-legged friend. You might be surprised how many places will say yes if you just enquire and give them some reassurance that your dog will respect the house rules!
(source)
(source)

 4. Save a Dog


You can impress your dog loving friends or family members by donating money to your local welfare, shelter or dog rescue group in lieu of a gift. Who really needs another recipe book when the same amount of money could help pay for care to help save a 4-legged life?
 I do love Giddy and Twinkle's words of wisdom! (source)
If you really need a gift to wrap, most of these non-profit, volunteer-driven organisations have calendars they sell to help raise funds.




5. Spend time with a Dog
(source)

 At the end of the day, most of our dogs just want to spend time with us. 

 So take time this festive season to go for that extra walk, give that extra pat, groom or game of fetch (depending on what your dog likes and if it is a game, be sure to take a video and submit it to help science!). 

 If you don't have a dog, consider volunteering at your local shelter or welfare group. The festive season is an insanely busy period for these places and they are often overrun with dogs who have strayed while their owners are away, who are scared of fireworks or who have been dumped. 
(source)
Just volunteering your time to help clean, feed, walk and care for half a day or three could make a huge difference to the dedicated staff. These people tend to miss out on Christmas lunch with their families or New Year's Eve partying year after year because they nobly spend it looking after our 4-legged friends.



So there you have it - my top 5 gift ideas for two- and four-legged friends this silly season. What's on your gift list?

Wishing you and yours a safe and fun festive season this year Julie.
Here's hoping we all make it past Friday and if we do, I'm sure 2013 is going to be a cracker!

 Fa la la la laaaa, la la la laa!

 x Mia 

Further reading:

Sitler R.K. (2006). The 2012 Phenomenon New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar, Nova Religio, 9 (3) 24-38. DOI:

© Mia Cobb 2012
Continue Reading »
DoYouBelieveInDog
0 Comments

You Might Also Like

Project: Play with your dog

11 December 2012

The Science Surrounding Children & Dogs: Part 3 (The Ugly)

The Science Surrounding Children & Dogs: Part 3 (The Ugly)

Cute or feeding an unrealistic fantasy? (source)
Hey Julie,

You raise such an important point! 

In the same way that popular culture can influence our perceptions and interpretations of ‘cute’ in domains like body image and kawaii, photos of babies with dogs can set us up with unrealistic expectations that might lead to ugly situations and devastating outcomes.



 And it’s some of The Ugly side of the science surrounding children and dogs that I want to share with you today. Dogs can hurt children and children can hurt dogs. 

It’s ugly alright.

Dogs biting kids:
As you pointed out in your last post, part of the The Ugly is that dogs can and do bite babies and kids.

(source)
Dog bites are the most frequently reported type of animal bite to humans.

The risk factors for being bitten vary a little from study to study (as you'd expect given each study looks at a different population), but generally, it’s consistent that the kids most at risk were:

  • Aged five years or under (with the 5-10yr age group a close second);
  • Attempting to access the dog’s territory or a resource (toy/food/bone, etc.) sometimes with the dog on lead or chained in a yard, or
  • Provoking the dog (by stepping on; pulling the dog’s hair/ears; hitting or attempting to ‘discipline’ the dog or waking a sleeping dog);
  • At home or in a friend’s/neighbour’s/relative’s house (i.e. a dog known to the child and generally in the dog’s home environment)
  • Not directly supervised by an adult.
    • From Reisner et al., 2007 (source)
  • Boys appear more likely to be bitten by dogs not from their own households, but boys and girls have been shown to be bitten equally by dogs from their own households.
(source)

I emphasise most at risk, as obviously all people are at some risk of being bitten by any dog they encounter.

Dogs involved often have no prior history of biting children, although some have previously bitten adults or other animals.

 We don’t know the full story.
Most figures regarding dog bites coming from hospital reports or other health authorities. It’s been calculated that in the USA, over 900 dog bite injuries are treated in hospital emergency departments each day. The same study estimated that for every dog bite fatality; there are approximately 16,000 dog-bite related emergency department visits. Just staggering figures!
(source)

And yet, dog bites are most likely under-reported. Not all dog bites get treated at hospital and as such, many cases may go unreported. 

 A study from the 1980’s demonstrated that nearly half of 3,000 children (aged 4-18) surveyed reported being bitten by a dog in their lifetime. 
More than 36 times the rate reported to authorities!

Identification of the dog breeds involved is probably inaccurate. Dog breed identification for dogs involved in attacks are usually self-reported to health authorities by the victim or victim’s family. Recent research has demonstrated how hard it is for even dog experts to accurately identify dog breeds, so can you see where there might be an issue in the validity of this data?

Why are young kids at such high risk of being bitten?
(source)
It’s not the full story, but research has shown that the age groups most at risk don’t pay attention to dogs’ body language but focus their attention on the face. Children do misinterpret angry dog facial expressions as smiling and being happy. 
"My, what big teeth you have..."
An eye-tracking research study showed that for some reason, young children’s’ eyes focus in on the angry dogs’ mouth and teeth area instead of following the usual eye-nose-mouth scan pattern that they show for other faces. This information offers an important insight that may be used to develop education strategies for children and their interactions with dogs.

Kids abusing dogs:
The notion of children deliberately inflicting pain or suffering on dogs and other animals is distressing. 
But it happens.

A symptom of other problems
Children who abuse animals are reportedly twice as likely to have experienced sexual or physical abuse themselves compared to children who are not cruel to animals. 

They often come from households of domestic/family violence. 

They often experience parental alcoholism/unavailablility. 
(source)

Violent behaviour is believed to be learned by these children as a viable tool in relationships (i.e. this is how you relate to others) and/or is modelled from adult behaviour they have directly observed. 

Exerting ‘power’ over an animal may also assist children who feel otherwise powerless in such situations of family violence. 
It's incredibly sad. For everyone. The children and the dogs.

(source)
Motivations for animal cruelty by children have been cited as: 

  • displaced hostility against a person to an animal; 
  • expression of aggression; 
  • post-traumatic play; and 
  • to hurt someone else by hurting a animals (using the animal as a vehicle for emotional abuse). 
Younger children tend to fall into the ‘exploratory or curious’ (think ants and magnifying glasses) rather than ‘pathological’ or ‘delinquent’ classification used in describing categories of people engaging in animal abuse.

Animal abuse as a child lead to..?
Research has demonstrated associations between acts of childhood cruelty to animals and acts of serious, recurrent, interpersonal aggression/violence and other generalised anti-social behaviours as adults. 
(source)
Although it is tempting to suggest that animal cruelty exhibited in childhood leads to interpersonal violence in adulthood, it is considered a better conclusion that childhood home environment is a strong predictor of the development of many violent behaviours, often clustered together.

 Childhood experiences into adulthood:
Most fearful adults report their fear of dogs began in childhood. However, being attacked as a child doesn’t necessarily mean you will be fearful of dogs as an adult. 

 Most adults are dog-fearful following a direct experience of dog bite rather than being influenced by an attack event that happened to someone they knew or from verbal information/education passed to them by others. 

 Amazingly, being bitten as a child has not been associated with a dislike of dogs. Positive experiences with dogs prior to being bitten made children less likely to become dog-phobic adults. It’s not fully understood why some children can recover and others retain their fearfulness into adulthood, sometimes even suffering ongoing PTSD.

(source)
Studies that utilised dogs (and other animals) with groups of children deemed 'at risk' of engaging in anti-social behaviours  have found that programs comprising a mix of discussions of interpersonal issues and conflict management along with the proper care and obedience training of dogs (and other animals) have demonstrated decreased fear of dogs/animals and improved attitudes towards self and others – sound familiar? 

 It’s The Good shining through, even in the face of The Ugly!

So there you have it Julie. 
Some of the science surrounding children and dogs: the good, the bad and the ugly.

I’m really hoping you can tell me about something fun and frivolous in your next post!

Mia
What hasn't been in any other image I've used in these three posts? Parental supervision! (source)

Further reading:
Meints K., Allen K. & Watson C. (2011). Atypical face-scan patterns in children misinterpreting dogs facial expressions evidence from eye-tracking, Injury Prevention, 16 (Supplement 1) A173-A173. DOI:

Shewell P.C. & Nancarrow J.D. (1991). Dogs that bite., BMJ, 303 (6816) 1512-1513. DOI:

Reisner I.R., Shofer F.S. & Nance M.L. (2007). Behavioral assessment of child-directed canine aggression, Injury Prevention, 13 (5) 348-351. DOI:

Weiss H.B. Incidence of Dog Bite Injuries Treated in Emergency Departments, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 279 (1) 51-53. DOI:

Ozanne-Smith J., Ashby K. & Stathakis V.Z. (2001). Dog bite and injury prevention--analysis, critical review, and research agenda., Injury prevention : journal of the International Society for Child and Adolescent Injury Prevention, 7 321-326. PMID:

Avner J.R. & Baker M.D. (1991). Dog bites in urban children., Pediatrics, 88 (1) 55-57. PMID:

Ascione F.R. (1993). Children Who are Cruel to Animals: A Review of Research and Implications for Developmental Psychopathology, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 6 (4) 226-247. Other: Link

 Currie C.L. (2006). Animal cruelty by children exposed to domestic violence, Child Abuse & Neglect, 30 (4) 425-435. DOI:

ARLUKE A., LEVIN J., LUKE C. & ASCIONE F. (1999). The Relationship of Animal Abuse to Violence and Other Forms of Antisocial Behavior, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 14 (9) 963-975. DOI:

McPhedran S. (2009). Animal Abuse, Family Violence, and Child Wellbeing: A Review, Journal of Family Violence, 24 (1) 41-52. DOI:

Duncan A. & Miller C. (2002). The impact of an abusive family context on childhood animal cruelty and adult violence, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7 (4) 365-383. DOI:

Zasloff L.R., Hart L.A. & Weiss J.M. (2003). Dog training as a violence prevention tool for at-risk adolescents, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 16 (4) 352-359. DOI:

Doogan S. & Thomas G.V. (1992). Origins of fear of dogs in adults and children: The role of conditioning processes and prior familiarity with dogs, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 30 (4) 387-394. DOI:

© Mia Cobb 2012
Continue Reading »
DoYouBelieveInDog
2 Comments

You Might Also Like

ugly

28 November 2012

The Science Surrounding Children & Dogs: Part 2 (The Bad)

The Science Surrounding Children & Dogs: Part 2 (The Bad)

I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving Julie!

(source)
I’m not exactly sure what that means, as we don’t celebrate it in Australia, but I hope you had a great time with your family and friends all the same!

Thanks for all those fantastic resources you included in your last blog post. It was also great to see some extras posted by readers in the comments section. 

(source)

Last time I looked at ‘The Good’ of some the science surrounding children and dogs. This post, it’s time to cover some of the ‘The Bad’. 

What can possibly be bad about children and dogs? Well, dogs don’t live as long as us, for one.



When dogs die
(source)
Having established last time that dogs can benefit kids’ confidence, self-belief, trust, respect and heaps of other positive attitudes and behaviours, I was left wondering how losing a pet dog impacts children. Loss of a companion animal can be a devastating event for people of any age.

Humans don’t all experience grief equally.
Our understanding of death is linked to our developmental state, but young children can still feel pain at the loss of a family dog. For many children, the death of a pet dog will be their first experience with this kind of loss and grief. Pet dogs can be almost-constant companions for children, and have been assigned a role in reflected appraisal similar to that of a best friend.

Psychologists encourage parents/guardians to explain death to kids sensitively and with honesty. Adults should answer questions simply, using clear and accurate information and avoid the desire to ‘protect’ children from death by hiding the truth of a pet’s illness or euthanasia. This is because children with active imaginations may create scenarios about the death that are far worse than reality. 

Adults should allow children to express their grief (through verbal, artistic or written expression; reading stories about the death of pets, etc.), acknowledging the importance of the relationship lost (rather than trivializing the death or running to buy a new puppy) and helping children to understand that grief is a normal and natural emotion that helps us cope with death.

Sometimes bad can be good
(source)
Some psychologists believe that such trauma (with a successful associated recovery) can strengthen our capacity to deal with future stress and adversity. 

 This is referred to as psychological resilience and is considered a desirable and healthy process as it enables a person, or in this case a child, to develop coping strategies and support networks (friends, adults, family, etc.) that will serve them in difficult times later in life.

Your dog is a zoo-
Zoo noses? (source)
It's true (when you're using zo/zoo- as a prefix to indicate animals are involved). And it's about noses. Not noses-noses, that would be silly. I'm talking about Zoonoses. As in diseases that can transfer from animals to people. As in from a dog to a child. They're not pretty. 

Research has shown that people can be generally uninformed about some of the most common zoonotic diseases (e.g. common roundworm eggs readily transfer between dogs and people; the worm larvae can decide to live in the back of children's eyes which can lead to blindness - people should know that!)
(source)
I suggest that if any of your dog-owning friends with children aren't aware of the risks of zoonotic diseases, they run an online search for 'dogs zoonosis [insert country of residence]' so they can read up on what parasite control and other measures can be used in their neck of the globe to reduce the risk of zoonoses. 

(source)

 Maintaining good child and dog health and hygiene should be a no-brainer. Did you know dogs can catch things from kids too? That's called reverse zoonosis. 

 And to think sharing is something I normally praise my toddler for!


 I hope you’ll grit your teeth and stick with me for my third post about the science surrounding children and dogs. 

 You’ve seen The Good and now The Bad – next time, I'm going to bring out The Ugly. I'll also touch on what science has to say about our childhood experience with dogs influencing us as adults. 

 What do you reckon your childhood experiences with Arf contributed to your adult attitudes?

Take care,

Mia

Further reading:

 Gerwolls M.K. & Labott S.M. (1994). Adjustment to the Death of a Companion Animal, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 7 (3) 172-187. DOI:

Serpell J.A. (1981). Childhood Pets and their Influence on Adults' Attitudes, Psychological Reports, 49 (2) 651-654. DOI:

Davis J.H. (1987). Preadolescent Self-Concept Development and Pet Ownership, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 1 (2) 90-94. DOI:

Van Houtte B.A. & Jarvis P.A. (1995). The role of pets in preadolescent psychosocial development, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 16 (3) 463-479. DOI:

Bryant B.K. (1990). The Richness of the Child-Pet Relationship: A Consideration of Both Benefits and Costs of Pets to Children, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 3 (4) 253-261. DOI:

Kaufman K.R. & Kaufman N.D. (2006). And Then the Dog Died, Death Studies, 30 (1) 61-76. DOI:

Bonanno G.A. (2004). Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?, American Psychologist, 59 (1) 20-28. DOI:

Bingham G.M., Budke C.M. & Slater M.R. (2010). Knowledge and perceptions of dog-associated zoonoses: Brazos County, Texas, USA, Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 93 (2-3) 211-221. DOI:

© Mia Cobb 2012
Continue Reading »
DoYouBelieveInDog
6 Comments

You Might Also Like

zoonoses
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
[name=Do You Believe in Dog?] [img=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih0oTdT87wf4V9ic3qh3r4nwYEQ2IsqFtweaU5RXbfIGujIMEg7n7jBmLq88mM9ZWZZ74jemUA2tK0UDNV-mLf4Mx7UzOEv6FISOcaffwhjDIU-9DgKhUj1VILdKBCInozoneqSXX6_kPP/s100/DYBID3+SPARCS2013.jpg] [description=Do You Believe in Dog? is a popular canine science platform presented by Mia Cobb and Julie Hecht. We think it's important that everyone be able to access and understand the latest canine research.] (facebook=https://www.facebook.com/DoYouBelieveInDog/) (twitter=https://www.twitter.com/doubelieveindog/) (instagram=https://www.instagram.com/mlcobb77/) (instagram=https://www.instagram.com/dogspies/)

Follow @SunriseSunsetBlog