Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label canine learning

Treating Dog Anxiety | 3 Proven Treatments for Fear of Thunderstorms and Fireworks

How Prevalent is Dog Anxiety for Thunder Typical dog fear stance: ears back, whites of the  eyes  showing,  head lowered  and back hunched. A dog anxiety survey of 2000 dog owners found that approximately 13% of dogs suffer from noise phobias, defined as a persistent, irrational fear response.  Yet of those surveyed, only one third of the respondents whose dogs exhibited  symptoms had sought any treatment or professional advice to manage their dog's condition. Furthermore the Bristol survey found that 50% of owners did not recognize that behaviors they reported in response to loud noises were in fact fear related symptoms. Here are three effective treatments for reducing canine anxiety caused by fireworks, gunshots and thunderstorms. Noise Sensitive Dogs: Causes of Noise Phobias and Anxiety Some dogs exhibit fear of loud noises from an early age while others display a sudden or slowly increasing fear of loud noises over time. Certain breeds, such as

How Dogs Learn The Meaning Of Words

The average dog can learn as many as 150 words, a fairly substantial vocabulary beyond sit, stay and come. Research with several border collies has brought those vocabulary numbers up beyond 400 words, and a border collie named Chaser has learned the names of 1022 objects, which he can differentiate and fetch on command.  There appears to be no upper limit in Chaser's vocabulary lessons, as he continues to add words to his lexicon. In the wake of such impressive results, researchers Emile van der Zee, Helen Zulch and Daniel Mills sought to determine the presence of a key feature of human word comprehension in canine learning. In the research article,  Word Generalization by a Dog (Canis familiaris): Is Shape Important?, the researchers sought to determine if shape bias existed in dogs as it does in humans. Experiments with human 2 year olds, have shown a "shape bias" exists in the learning of new words.  Simply put, once the child associates a name with an object,