Play with your dog for science

Project: Play With Your Dog (our latest study)

Hi Mia,

Wow. Very heavy stuff. I’m really happy you put this all out there. Its a great resource, especially when people tend to think, "That wont happen to me." An uncomfortable and upsetting situation hopefully becomes more real and understandable. Hopefully, an eye of caution will be extended to those circumstances more often associated with bites. 

Show us how you play
You’re right, my mind has been 100% on things not related to dog bites. At the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab, we just launched our next project. It’s called, Project: Play with Your Dog. 

We are cataloguing all the ways—traditional, original, or creative—people play with their dogs. To do this, we are using the Citizen Science platform and asking dog owners to submit short videos of themselves playing with their dog. Its really just a happy study.

Our Project on Scientific American Citizen Science

This week, we launched with a guest blog post on Scientific American, How do you play with your dog? and the project is now on their Citizen Science page.

Now we need hundreds of videos of people playing with their dogs!  


How people can participate: 
Find or make a 30-60 second video of you and your dog playing in whatever way you like to play together, and then upload the video to our website and complete a short survey. 

REALLY IMPORTANT: Both dog and person should be visible for all or most of the video. As cute as it is to see your dog running back and forth, we need to see you in the video playing with your dog. SUGGESTIONS: Attach the video camera to a tripod to capture the play area, or have another person hold the video camera.

Then, everyone is invited to add a picture to our Wall of Contributors (which is growing and the pictures are really awesome!)

Project: Play with Your Dog is open to anyone, in any country. If you live with a dog, we want to see you play.

Source: Business Insider Science

Additional details:
Subjects: Participants must be at least 8 years old 
Time Commitment: 20 to 30 minutes
Project Duration: Ongoing through Spring 2013
Project Website: www.DogHumanPlay.com 
Contact: DogCognitionStudy@gmail.com

Thats whats going on in my world. Look forward to seeing a video of Elke in the river and you with stick in hand ;)

Happy holidays on the horizon!!!

Julie  

© Julie Hecht 2012  

Read more

So much dog to talk about All the time in the world!

(source)

Hi Mia,

Yowzer!! We have so much to talk about! Dogs eating poop, welfare assessment, behavioural needs, enrichment and the “guilty look” are only the beginning! 

 

Speaking of which, I’m sure you have at least 7,000 more words on assessing welfare. Can you tell me more about assessing welfare?

You hyperlinked to a scientific journal article by Dr. Georgia Mason, and that made me smile a lot lot lot (or, Alot).

I am a bit of a Georgia Mason worshiper (for any of you who don’t know, she is a researcher in Animal Behaviour and Welfare at the University of Guelph. She explores how the housing of “Applied Animals,” those animals managed or controlled by humans, affects behaviour, brain functioning and welfare. She focuses on lab, farm and zoo animals... I feel like The Oz coming down and speaking to people other than you, Mia. Weird). Anyway, a while back, I gave Dr. Mason directions at a conference in France, and its still a big deal in my book.

So, yes! Tell me more about welfare assessment!!!

Life for me presently revolves around writing projects. Instead of writing about my writing projects, Ill give you a visual interpretation of what I’m working on and how I feel about it.

How I feel after reading a scientific paper and having a worthwhile thought:

Yay words! (source)

How I feel after sitting and writing for a long time:

(source)

Writing projects are about:

Chaser. (source)

Rico. (source)

Sofia. (source)

Another writing project on this beloved topic:

Whats the "guilty look" all about? (source)

And writing up research I presented at the 3rd Canine Science Forum in Barcelona, where we met, awww...

What is aesthetically pleasing? (source)

What is aesthetically pleasing? (source)

Come September well gear up to finish a study at the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab about this:

What the nose knows.(source)

I’ll tell you more about these pictures later.

Happy weekend!!!

JULIE 

Referenced

Mason, G. 1993. Why is there no simple way of Measuring Animal Welfare? Animal Welfare 2, 301-319. Click here for abstract.

© Julie Hecht 2012

Read more