Helping Pets Behave

X-Ray of Dog Drinking Water.

Detector dogs be helping to save bees!

These dogs are being trained differently to how my dog was trained, multiple ways to train on scent!

Ms. Preston, 45, certifies that each beehive crossing the state line is free of American foulbrood, bacteria that are harmless to humans but can spread quickly from hive to hive, decimating bee populations.

“Everything else that can go wrong with the hives is fixable,” she said, “but not that.”

Four years ago, Ms. Preston trained a dog to help her find foulbrood, figuring it out as she went along. She recently received a grant through the federal farm bill to expand her canine detection program, which could serve as a model for other states.

Unlike human inspectors, dogs don’t need the hives opened up to check them for foulbrood. They can trot by, sniffing at the comb, and tell if the bacteria have killed off any larvae. Four people working full time cover less than half of what her dog can, Ms. Preston said.

On a recent Friday morning, on the green slopes behind her home here in Jarrettsville, Ms. Preston tossed a toy around for Tukka, a young springer spaniel she had just adopted.At first glance, it didn’t look like a workday. But that toy had been sealed in a plastic bag with foulbrood, and Ms. Preston was in the early stages of training Tukka on the scent. With any luck, he will join her team before the end of the year.

“You want Foulbrood Bunny?” she asked, throwing the fuzzy gray toy across the field.

Tukka caught the toy in a frenzy, salivating at the smell of it, chewing it with delirious pleasure. “This is what I want to see,” Ms. Preston said.

Soon, she will move on to putting foulbrood inside a small rubber toy and throwing it farther, or in an unexpected direction, to see if Tukka can sniff it out. Then she will hide the scent in the training installation she built exactly for this purpose — tubes mounted close together at various heights on an industrial plastic pallet.

If the exercises are successful, Tukka will learn to find even small traces of the scent, and communicate that to Ms. Preston by pointing with his nose, then sitting down.

She trained Mack the same way, bonding with the dog through games and repetition, building up his confidence and trust, all the while teaching him the basics of his important new job. That training took nine months.

Mack was a year and a half old when she found him living in a garage. Ms. Preston adopted him on the spot and took him to Mark Flynn, the K-9 unit commander at the state’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, to get his opinion.

Mr. Flynn trains dogs to associate scents with play. “We’re looking for those dogs that’ll jump into water to get the ball, the ones completely obsessed with their toys,” he said. “Because when a dog is searching, he believes in his heart he’s trying to find his toy.”

This applies whether the dog is looking for contraband cellphones and drugs in prison cells, or foulbrood in beehives.

Many of the dogs Mr. Flynn trains are adopted through rescue organizations, exhibiting the kind of high-energy behavior and hunting instincts that make them unlikely to be adopted as family pets, but ideal for scent work.

Mack’s drive was low. “But there is this phenomenon where you can actually build up drive in a dog,” Mr. Flynn said. And through play, reward and repetition, that’s just what Ms. Preston did.

She goes home in the middle of her busy workdays to train Tukka, a rescue dog she adopted through Mr. Flynn, because Tukka requires sessions at least four times a day. It’s a lot of time, but Ms. Preston reminds herself that once Tukka is up to speed, he will help her team cover more ground, work faster and more meticulously, and protect more honeybees.

“Dogs are great because they can sniff it out at such low levels,”  Dr. Spivak said. But they are also rare in the business, in part because of the investment in training them. She has seen a dog working among hives only once, and that was almost 30 years ago.

‘Dog-Speak’ important for social bonding between pet and owner

Scientists at the University of York have shown that using ‘dog-speak’ to communicate with dogs is important in relationship-building between pet and owner, similar to the way that ‘baby-talk’ is to bonding between a baby and an adult.

Speech interaction experiments between adult dogs and humans showed that this particular type of speech improves dog attention and may help humans to socially bond with their pets.

Previous studies on communicating with dogs had suggested that talking in a high-pitch voice with exaggerated emotion, just as adults do with babies, improved engagement with puppies but made little difference with adult dogs.

Researchers at York tested this theory with new experiments designed to understand more about why humans talk to dogs like this and if it is useful to the dogs in some way or whether humans do this simply because they like to treat dogs in the same way as babies.

Speech register

Dr Katie Slocombe from the University of York’s Department of Psychology, said: “A special speech register, known as infant-directed speech, is thought to aid language acquisition and improve the way a human baby bonds with an adult. This form of speech is known to share some similarities with the way in which humans talk to their pet dogs, known as dog-directed speech.

“This high-pitched rhythmic speech is common in human interactions with dogs in western cultures, but there isn’t a great deal known about whether it benefits a dog in the same way that it does a baby.

“We wanted to look at this question and see whether social bonding between animals and humans was influenced by the type and content of the communication.”

Unlike previous experiments, the research team positioned real humans in the same room as the dog, rather than broadcasting speech over a loud speaker without a human present. This made the set-up more naturalistic for the dogs and helped the team test whether dogs not only paid more attention to ‘dog speak’, but were motivated to spend more time with the person who had spoken to them in that way.

Dog-related content

Researchers did a series of speech tests with adult dogs, where they were given the chance to listen to one person using dog-directed speech containing phrases such as ‘you’re a good dog’, and ‘shall we go for a walk?’, and then another person using adult-directed speech with no dog-related content, such as ‘I went to the cinema last night.’.

Attention during the speech was measured, and following the speech, the dogs were allowed to choose which speaker they wanted to physically interact with.

The speakers then mixed dog-directed speech with non-dog-related words and adult-directed speech with dog-related words, to allow the researchers to understand whether it was the high-pitched emotional tone of the speech that dogs were attracted to or the words themselves.

Preferences

Alex Benjamin, PhD student from the University’s Department of Psychology, said: “We found that adult dogs were more likely to want to interact and spend time with the speaker that used dog-directed speech with dog-related content, than they did those that used adult-directed speech with no dog-related content.  

“When we mixed-up the two types of speech and content, the dogs showed no preference for one speaker over the other. This suggests that adult dogs need to hear dog-relevant words spoken in a high-pitched emotional voice in order to find it relevant.

“We hope this research will be useful for pet owners interacting with their dogs, and also for veterinary professionals and rescue workers.”