Promising results from a pilot study of synthetic cat-appeasing pheromones (Feliway Multicat) for aggression between cats that live together. Photo: Samarsky / Shutterstock Cat owners know only too well that cats can be choosy. As solitary hunters, the domestic cat can do just fine alone and does not have to be friends with other members of the species. On the other hand, cats can live in social groups, especially in colonies of female cats and their offspring, when female cats will help care for each other’s young. Many people have multiple pet cats and they aren’t always friends. It is obvious cats don’t get along if they fight. But there are also more subtle signs of cat aggression, such as when one cat blocks another cat’s access to a resource like the litter box. As well as bouts of aggression, when cats don’t get along they may hold urine for too long, pee outside the box, suffer feline idiopathic cystitis, over-eat or lose weight, or sometimes (if they have outdoors access) one...
Everything you need to know about the use of positive punishment in dog training. Photo: JJ Photographer/Shutterstock If you are a new dog owner, or even if you’ve been around dogs for a while, this article is for you. It covers the technical definition of positive punishment, examples of what it is, what we know about the risks of using it and what professional organizations advise. Let’s get the technical definition out of the way first. What is positive punishment in dog training? You’ll have noticed I said positive punishment instead of just punishment. In everyday language, we often say punishment when what we technically mean is positive punishment. We can also have negative punishment, but that will be the topic of another post. Punishment means something that reduces the likelihood of a behaviour happening again i.e. the behaviour goes down in frequency. And positive means that something is added. So positive punishment means adding something after the dog did a behaviour ...
Dogs fall asleep faster but get less deep sleep after a bad experience compared to after a good experience. Photo: Karen Laventure (Shutterstock) We all know the feeling when something bad happens in the day and then we just can’t sleep at night. It turns out that, just like humans, dogs’ sleep is affected by bad experiences – but the effects are not quite the same. A new paper by Dr. Anna Kis ( Hungarian Academy of Sciences ) (including members of the Family Dog Project ) took EEG measurements of dogs sleeping after a good or bad experience. While humans take longer to fall asleep after a bad day, the dogs fell asleep more quickly after a bad experience than after a good one. This is thought to be a protective response to stress. But, just like humans, dogs did not sleep as well after the bad experience, showing their sleep was disturbed. 16 pet dogs took part in the study, which took place over 3 sessions. The first session was a practice one so the dogs could get used to the equipm...
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