From Penguins to Pups: The Science of Animal Aggression with Dr. Eddie Fernandez

Ever wondered why your dog growls at other pups or why penguins are surprisingly aggressive? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dr. Eddie Fernandez as we uncover the mysteries of aggression in animals from an academic perspective. Dr. Fernandez shares his expertise in animal welfare research, taking us on a journey through the fascinating world of animal behavior.

Throughout this episode, we'll explore the complex world of aggression and its various forms across species like dogs, hippos, walruses, and even penguins. We'll discuss how artificial selection has affected aggression in different breeds of dogs and touch on the effects of captivity on various species.

Finally, we'll reveal the power of enrichment for managing animal behavior, discussing reinforcement and punishment contingencies to maintain behavior. Dr. Fernandez shares examples of successful enrichment programs, like scent work and nose work for dogs. Don't miss this captivating episode with Eddie  as we navigate the intricate world of animal from the perspective of both evolution and learning.

The Aggression in Dogs Conference

The Aggression in Dogs Master Course

The Bitey End of the Dog Bonus Episodes

About Dr. Fernandez:

Eduardo J. Fernandez is a Senior Lecturer of Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare in the School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at the University of Adelaide (Australia). He received his Ph.D. in Psychology (minors in Neuroscience and Animal Behavior) from Indiana University, where he worked with the Indianapolis and Cincinnati Zoo. He received his M.S. in Behavior Analysis from the University of North Texas, where he founded the Organization for Reinforcement Contingencies with Animals (ORCA). Most of his past and current work involves behavioral research applied to the welfare and training of zoo, aquarium, and companion animals. His past positions include a Visiting Professorship at Seattle Pacific University, a Visiting Professorship in the School of Behavior Analysis at the Florida Institute of Technology, an Affiliate Assistant Professorship in the Psychology Department at the University of Washington, a Research Fellowship with Woodland Park Zoo, and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. While working with UW and the Woodland Park Zoo, he started the Behavioral Enrichment Animal Research (BEAR) group, which conducted welfare research with many of the species and exhibits located throughout the zoo. He currently runs the Operant Welfare Lab (OWL), which is dedicated to the use of learning principles to improve the lives of animals across many settings, including exotic animals in zoos and companion animals in homes and shelters. OWL is also part of the broader Animal Behaviour, Welfare, and Anthrozoology Lab (ABWAL; abwal.com). Many of Eduardo’s past publications, research projects, and presentations can be found on his ResearchGate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eduardo_Fernandez18

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Aggression isn't just a dog thing, of course. It's normal behavior in many species and I'm delighted to chat with Dr Eddie Fernandez for this episode about the whys of aggression from an evolutionary perspective and a variety of animals, including dogs, hippos, walruses and even penguins. Eddie does a great job of breaking down aggression from a variety of different scientific perspectives and I'm sure you'll find this episode enlightening. Dr Fernandez received his PhD in psychology, with a minors in neuroscience and animal behavior, from Indiana University and his master's in science and behavior analysis from the University of North Texas. Much of his past and current research involves the behavioral training and welfare of zoo, aquarium and companion animals. He's currently a senior lecturer of applied animal behavior and welfare in the School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and if you are enjoying the bitey end of the dog, you can support the podcast by going to aggressivedogcom, where there are a variety of resources to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, including the upcoming Aggression in Dogs conference happening from September 29th through October 1st 2023 in Chicago, illinois, with both in-person and online options. You can also learn more about the Aggression in Dogs master course, which is the most comprehensive course available anywhere in the world for learning how to work with and help dogs with aggression issues.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Hey everyone, welcome back to the bitey end of the dog. I have another special guest with me this week. Dr Eddie Fernandez is joining us and we're going to be approaching things from a multi-disciplinary perspective, which is what I love about this season. We've had a lot of folks with multiple degrees after their name, and Eddie is certainly one of those where he's dabbling in a few things like ABA, psychology, animal welfare, among a number of other things. So really super excited about this episode. So welcome to the show, eddie.

Speaker 2: 2:04

Hi, how's it?

Speaker 1: 2:05

going Doing wonderful. It's great to have you. Yeah, this is going to be great. And since we're talking about aggression during this podcast, of course I would love to hear from your multi-disciplinary perspective how you define aggression, because it's a question I ask a lot of different people and I get a lot of different answers, including myself. So how do you?

Speaker 2: 2:25

define it.

Speaker 2: 2:27

Right, and I always like to throw out the caveat here that I do some observations. I've done research involving aggression, but not directed at aggression. I've looked at a few different species where I'm looking at some type of typically conspecific activity. So you know a polar bear and whether it aggresses towards another polar bear, that may be included in an ethogram that I'm observing. It's also, i guess, worth mentioning, since we've now mentioned, that I do a lot of work with a lot of different species and I work with a lot of zoos, aquariums, as well as companion animals, and a lot of that is really welfare focused. So applied animal behavior. My title is actually a senior lecturer of applied animal behavior and welfare, so that gives you an idea of what I do.

Speaker 2: 3:12

So, now that I danced around your question there, how I define aggression usually is I don't worry about intent, i'm talking about the action, i don't think about intent. So what does it look like? and I think of aggression as some type of generally maladaptive behavior directed at another individual, conspecific or other Right. So we could hetero, specific or conspecific, and I'm generally thinking about it as some type of action, so something I can directly observe. The only component of that is that maladaptive part that gets a little tricky. So it's something that I am at least throwing on. Some interpretation of this is damaging in some way to the other individual.

Speaker 1: 4:05

In terms of maladaptive. Can you just define that a little further for anybody that might not be new to that term?

Speaker 2: 4:11

Yeah, yeah, this is why this gets a little tricky, so I'll give my simplified version of this. It's problematic to the welfare of that individual, so that's what I would say. It's either physiologically or behaviorally damaging to that individual in some way, right? So it's either gonna leave a bruise or it's going to make that animal go away and do something we would less like them to do. So there's the physiological and the behavioral part. That's what I would say about maladaptive in that way. But I'm taking a very pragmatic and proximate approach. So by pragmatic I just mean practical here. Hey, what is happening in the now, right now, for that animal, and how is that a problem for it?

Speaker 1: 5:01

Yeah, and it's interesting because, hearing your definition, you don't pull out any specific behaviors, because when you're looking at multi-species, we might be looking at all kinds of different behaviors or actions or body parts being used when we're talking about aggressive behavior, right? So am I kind of accurate there and saying that that's why you don't pick out like it's not just biting, it could be many other things, depending on the animal?

Speaker 2: 5:27

Yeah, absolutely, and this is why I leave off things like intent and I'm looking at the observable behavior instead, aggression in. Well, let's take one of my favorite species, a penguin, or favorite orders, really, for all 18 of the species. For most of the penguins, they have two ways. They tend to aggress in some way, which is with their beak or with their wings. So they do this wing flap and which, by the way, is incredibly adorable. When you have a little penguin or a fairy penguin, the smallest of them, i used to go into exhibits with them and at places like Cincinnati Zoo, where I would actually try to get them to aggress towards me because they'll grab your finger with their beak and start smacking their wing. I'm doing the action here that Mike can see but nobody else can see They'll start trying to smack their wing into your hand. So those are typically the two types. Now, that's not as adorable when it's something like a king penguin, so a meter high or three foot high penguin that is literally trying to jam its beak into your flesh, or if it slaps you with one of those wings. You feel it Like if you're walking by a king penguin and it didn't like that, you walked by it, it slaps you. By the way, there's a great one of the older.

Speaker 2: 6:49

There's a statistics text I thought they showed this in a psychology text as well that shows emperor penguins, the biggest of all of them, where they're all maintaining a wing distance away from each other, and that's part. So we see immediately one of the important functions of that behavior, which is determining the space where that penguin resides. So they all stay that wing distance. You can't hit me, i can't hit you with a wing. So that's aggression in penguins. But it can look very different. Boy, i've had a lot of different species aggress towards me, fortunately with and here's a word I'm going to define in a little bit but in protected contact. I've had gorillas. I've had a silverback gorilla aggress towards me which was tremendously. I think many people have had some form of aggression but I had the full extent of a silverback gorilla charged me in the night enclosure area, so behind the public scene, and leapt into the bars. So protected contact, meaning there's a barrier between me and the gorilla.

Speaker 1: 8:00

Thank goodness for that, yep Right.

Speaker 2: 8:02

As opposed to free contact where there is no barrier. It sent the bars rattling that it leapt into with its shoulder And we could talk about some of the antecedents and the consequences of that behavior as well, because all of that's important for the function. Part of the antecedent happened to be that he was there with a couple of the female gorillas and I happened to walk in. He didn't know who I was. This gorilla was known to be pretty aggressive and I walked in with a woman with me, so a female that he also didn't recognize. So he immediately charged me, kind of looked me up and down and it was an interesting experience, very different than penguin aggression, right And same with a lion again protected contact that I've had and under very similar antecedent conditions, where I happened to be with a couple research assistants that were female.

Speaker 2: 8:57

This male lion was around a couple female lions in this exhibit in Texas and he did a full charge at me. The difference there with lions is they don't typically run into things like that. He just did a full run at me and then stopped right at the end of the fence, which was still terrifying to have a lion actually charge you, regardless of the number of barriers you have between you. So we can talk about the topography nice fancy word to say what this visually looks like, the aggression And it can be very different across the different species that we're talking about, often very different. So people like Nico Tinbergen talked about aggression in sticklebacks, these little fish that he spent a lot of time studying and looking at what that territorial aggression is that they displayed. That's going to look very different than a penguin or a gorilla or a lion. A lot of different topographies.

Speaker 1: 9:56

Yeah, so let's jump back to the function there. So we're you know, because we've kind of talked about how it's going to look different depending on the species when we're talking about aggressive behaviors. But what's the function? Is it similar for all species or how do you get into that topic?

Speaker 2: 10:12

Yeah, we're getting into the really interesting. I think this, to me, is what fascinates me the most when I think about behavior on any level. And this is where we come to another part that we have to define. That, i think, is important. So Nico Tinbergen, who I just mentioned and who spent a lot of time studying sticklebacks, among many other species, gulls and wasps and other species, well-known ethologists, nico Tinbergen, so he in 63 came up with his four whys of animal behavior. Why does the animal behavior occur? And I'm not going to jump into too much detail of that. I think the important difference here is that he talked about many different, it's not just one reason, but we can talk about different approaches we take to understanding why this behavior occurs. And the big distinction he made, what can classify those four questions into two broader categories are the proximate or the learned reasons. So the stuff happening at the individual level, the stuff, the ontogeny, ontogenetic aspects of the behavior, and then the ultimate or the evolved, the phylogenetic or phylogenic aspects of that behavior. So we can think of why does an animal do something based on what it learned as an individual or what it experienced as an individual? because learning is one component of that And we can also talk about why does an animal do that? because of what it evolved to do as a species, so across those different animals and then within the lifetime of the animal. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. The words I use there proximate for that stuff happening in the now for the individual, and the ultimate being the species level, the evolved stuff. So you'll hear me often talk about learning versus evolutionary histories or I'll talk about the individual versus the species And, by the way, i'm not going to make a big separation here. But Timbergin did talk about cause versus function, using cause typically to identify more of the proximate stuff and function to identify more of the ultimate or evolved stuff. I'm not going to bother because behavior analysts and behaviorists in general and I come from a strong behavioral training background as well and teach things like applied behavior analysis with animals here in Australia. I use function to identify, as all behaviors do. We talk about the function of some behavior to mean what's been learned. So I'm going to use function and cause interchangeably, as many behaviors do. Boy, that was a lot of fancy stuff that I threw out there to get at this one bit where we're coming down to.

Speaker 2: 13:09

So here's the main point The things that we can look at when we think about aggression or any behavior. We can think about what is being learned, what has been learned, what's being learned at that moment, and also what components of it have been evolved. What have they've gotten from being a species, right? So we already talked about different ways that different species aggress. Well, that's a pretty good indication that that has to do with the evolutionary history. If it's something that happens across the species, pretty similar within the species and across different species probably tells us something about the evolutionary history. But now we can talk about the stuff happening that they learned from that. right, and the big one and I think this is where we see a lot of stuff talked about is what happens immediately.

Speaker 2: 14:02

What are the consequences for engaging in aggression? Well, one of those and this is something behavior analysts have spent quite a bit of time talking about is that by engaging in aggression, you make some aversive stimulus, some stimulus you did not want present go away, right? So if somebody's being annoying, right, if I have a dog that's barking near me and I don't buy it, by no means I want to make it sound like I'm promoting this, but we see this happen. This is something that people do. So you might see somebody that dogs barking, barking, barking, barking and someone might yell or even physically contact, hit the dog and the barking stops. Well, that aggression that the person has exhibited has now been negatively reinforced. So those are the proximate, immediate, those are the consequences involved and those are the behavioral contingencies. But then we can talk about some of the things, the types of aggression that are important, like I've already mentioned. So we can sum up those four whys that Timbergin had to really the two big ones, which are the proximate and ultimate functions of some behavior And, by the way, they work beautifully interchangeably.

Speaker 2: 15:27

I think what we see a lot of time is people tend to say, well, it's one or the other, or they focus only on one and they actually work very beautifully together. I often use the analogy of you think about something like a race car, right. And if I were to stop and say, well, what makes that race car go so fast? Is it the engine or the form of the body? And my answer would be it's not going to go fast. In fact, it's not going to go anywhere without both of those right, both are required. They both handle different aspects of why it's able to be a race car.

Speaker 1: 16:03

So yeah, So I want to dig a little deeper into the evolutionary aspect And you had mentioned, like in terms of a species. When you look at dogs, we can argue that it's one of the most diverse species on the planet in terms of the breeds and what we've selected for. So really not a question. but your thoughts around. you know like we have certain dogs like let's use livestock guardian dogs that might use aggression to protect their flock, or Belgian Malinois I use Belgian Malinois all the time but we know that they have a higher likelihood for protecting somebody or something because we've selected for that in the breeding process. So thoughts around that in terms of, is that what we consider that evolutionary or would that be more approximate in what we're doing in the, you know, individual level, breeding level? So what are your thoughts there?

Speaker 2: 16:53

Yeah, well, you're getting into something that is really interesting topic for ethologists, for evolutionary theorists, for behavioral ecologists. And I am neither I'm an applied ethologist as one of the things that I happen to be, of the different things I do applied ethological work, but I am not an evolutionary theorist. So I'm getting into a little bit of dangerous territory and describing some of this. That's my caveat of saying. Let me say I'm going to be cautious in what I'm saying. So you're talking about a selection pressure now and I like that you mentioned. That's great that you talked about what's being selected, because now we're talking about artificial selection, right, which is a different type of selection pressure. Artificial selection is how we've domesticated plants and animals, right. It's through this selection we decide. We are the ones that are somehow involved in selecting those organisms. Who's breeding, who doesn't. So that's the selection pressure, that's artificial selection. It does some really interesting things, as we know, if we look at across the different dog breeds and the variability across all the breeds, we see such different forms, right From big giant dogs that we've selected for it to tiny little dogs, and that includes some of the variability in behavior. So when we start getting into behavior and what that means for behavior. This is where it gets, i think, considerably trickier. And what I always say in understanding, i mean there's certainly considerable differences across breeds in terms of how they behave, including aggression. We should see that right.

Speaker 2: 18:37

This artificial selection pressure has imposed a number of things that are going to affect behavior. Some of that is genetic, which I know almost nothing about when it comes to genetics, and some of that can even be based on the morphology of what we're selecting for right. So you select a little dog, start producing this tiny little animal they make. They're probably going to aggress differently than something that's much bigger, so we may see more barking as opposed to biting. I don't know.

Speaker 2: 19:13

But that's the big one that I like to throw out here is I don't know. There's so much variability that we see that I'm always cautious and at least a little bit skeptical, and by skeptical I mean skeptical from a scientific perspective, i do not mean cynical, i mean I want to see the data. So I'm always at least a little skeptical when somebody says, well, this is what these breeds do, because all I know is that there's quite a bit of variability still. That exists, and we've seen some of the research recently that's been published looking at some of these things. In fact, there's that big paper in science that Heckman was involved with that talked about the variability in the behaviors within a breed. That wasn't to say there's not predictors, there's not things that are more or less common across breeds, but it is saying that it's nowhere near as static as I think we've sometimes treated it Definitely.

Speaker 1: 20:06

Yeah, Definitely Yeah. So jumping back to the multi-species perspective again here and your thoughts on if you look at animals, let's say, in captive environments, versus more naturally occurring I don't know if I'm choosing the right words, but you have experience with both. So you've studied animals in the wild.

Speaker 1: 20:24

You've studied animals in zoo environments you know about domestic dogs, probably free roaming dogs or streeties as we might adorably call them. But so your thoughts there I mean how much, like we see in a conversation I have often too, and I've had it with some of the other guests on the show is how much are we benefiting animals or not and how much does it affect their behavior in certain environments? So if we look at many streeties or street dogs, we don't see sometimes the profound, overt, aggressive responses that we might see in dogs that are in the home or that are held captive in, certainly in very impoverished and low enrichment environments. So your thoughts around that in terms of especially when it comes to aggressive behaviors.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Yeah, this is tough And I have very, very little experience with any street dogs, with dogs under those conditions. but I do have a lot of experience in understanding the effects of captivity on other species, on quite a diversity of different species, understanding what are some of the welfare needs, for instance in zoo environments and then in homes as well, and understanding what some of those needs are. This is a really tricky question. It's a difficult one to answer is what are the effects of? just like trying to answer, what are the effects of domestication? Now we're asking what are the effects of captivity and what is the difference between, say, a tiger bred in captivity and a wild tiger, a tiger in its natural environment, which there's not a lot of wild, unfortunately left for many tigers these days. But what is the difference? well, some people have tried to look at this with different species. There's there's been some interesting studies with rats and mice. There's some research done a number of years ago that they were taking rats bread for generations in captivity and then bringing them back into the wild, and the rats ended up adapting fairly quickly. Likewise, in zoos there's a lot of work done, for we talk about the species, survival plans, breeding and so propagation and reintroduction Those are nice fancy words for saying we're gonna breed you in the zoo and then we're gonna release you back into the wild, and there's a lot of stuff that's been done along those lines. Really, some of the the best conservation efforts that zoos have been involved in Have helped protect things like the black footed ferret, the gold mine tamarin. Those are both species that would be extinct if it weren't for these breeding programs.

Speaker 2: 23:05

Well, debra Kleinman, who was one of the primary researchers involved with golden lion tamarins And breeding them in captivity and then releasing them into the wild in Columbia I highly encourage people to look at some of the if you're interested in this topic. Look at some of the challenges that they faced. I've published one study with gold nine tamarins, but nothing in relation to a reintroduction program or anything like that. Debra Kleinman is who really, through national zoo in in Washington DC, did amazing work with getting these gold mine tamarins bred in captivity and released in the wild, and they had a lot of failures to begin with, potentially because what it looked like were some of these tamarins were being released into the wild and then being pretty easily predated on. So that was one of the experiences is all of a sudden. I would somewhat facetiously say it was like we were homeschooling gold mine tamarins and then taking them to New York City And giving them like cab fare, being like, okay, good luck, right. So we breed them here in this captive condition they have little to no experience with predators and then we take them in a box and release them in Columbia.

Speaker 2: 24:22

So it's not quite that simple. I'm oversimplifying how this process, but it did take a number of iterations and it took a while to figure out what was important. What did they need? what were the experiences that helped promote better survival in the wild? and every species is going to be different at some level, so there's a lot that contributes to this. It's hard to say. I can't give you a simple answer to what is really the difference between the wild and captivity. What I would say is so these are experiences we can quantify in some way And I think it's the research that helps us understand that.

Speaker 2: 25:02

And there's certainly been a lot of looking at domestication itself. There is the Fox project that was done in Russia, right, the silver foxes, and looking at Decades of research that they looked at, what happens to their behaviors I don't know a ton about that research like the details, but for listeners that might be interested. So a lot of really cool stuff that was done with trying to understand Domestication. So the best answer I can give is that it's tricky. It's very, very tricky. We have to understand as much as we can about the behavior in relation to the environment.

Speaker 1: 25:46

Yeah, i can see.

Speaker 1: 25:47

It's just so difficult to study because you know getting that data is there's a lot of issues I'm sure With seeing, especially when you start talking about other species, because one of the things that dog trainers and behavior consultants often think about when we're drawing information from People that work with us species are from the zoo world is the problematic behaviors that occur from lack of enrichment Yeah, sometimes maladaptive aggression, or so. Can you talk more about that? I think it's a pretty well known topic in the dog training community, but maybe there's some listeners that be more interested in hearing your take on What happens.

Speaker 1: 26:18

Stereotypic behaviors like what puts the problem with lack of enrichment or or animal that's not receiving you know what they need.

Speaker 2: 26:27

Yeah, yeah, i have. By the way, i have a few papers. I've talked a little bit about the history of enrichment. This happens to be Thank you for asking this because this is one of my specialties So we're getting into stuff that I really know quite a bit about, which is great, makes me feel a little About this. So I've written a few papers. In fact, i published a few papers. Some of those are open access papers, talking about some of the history of enrichment. So I'm gonna really simplify this in saying how Markowitz is one of the big people in the seventies and eighties.

Speaker 2: 27:05

He's the father of enrichment, of environmental enrichment, where it got its start in zoos, and providing these opportunities. He thought about this actually originally as learning contingencies, as operant contingencies, so he thought about this as a form of behavioral engineering. So enrichment started As a behavior analytic endeavor, as a skinnerian endeavor, and that's something that people often don't realize. So really important to acknowledge some of those and how Markowitz was doing things like giving an animal an opportunity to interact with his environment. So if it did something like Chase this artificial prey, it would receive a consequence for engaging in that. So get a reinforcer for might, get a treat for chasing that prey item. So he did that with servals in San Francisco zoo.

Speaker 2: 27:57

Some of this was very artificial, very contrived. He had mandrels competing against the public in an arcade like game at the Portland Metro Park zoo in Oregon zoo. So I always love this example. Even though it's it this, we're talking mid to late seventies when this was happening. So it's good to keep that Historical context in mind because I would never imagine doing something like this now. How artificial, how contrived, how much of a. It's not natural for the animal But it had beneficial effects. There are paramand rules and mandrels are baboon, like primate, very colorful, but so that's what you think of with the mandrel. It's like a baboon with an extremely colorful but Boy. I just gave the like I just explained a mandrel to my mother.

Speaker 2: 28:44

I feel like that was a, if she were asking me that my, my old Cuban mother is like what is the mandrel Be like? it's a baboon with a really colorful but mom picture comes right to mind when you say that.

Speaker 1: 28:55

So perfect description.

Speaker 2: 28:58

That was just a very tiny bit of my mother impersonation. They're the old Cuban With these baboon, so anyway, we'll move away from that. So he had these games and there was this board. This was an electromechanical device. There was one on the end of the enclosure on the inside for the mandrel and there was one on the outside for the public, and it was a reaction game. So it had a light and you had to move your hand from one light to the other, to the other, and you had to try to do that as quickly as you could when it would light up. So it was a time reaction game And there was a sign in front of it that said can you beat the monkey or something like that? can you beat the drill, the mandrel? so people would walk up and they go this is silly, you know and they drop their it's again, keep in mind this is mid the late seventies. They dropped their nickel in, so that's how much it would cost it was a nickel to drop that into the machine and the baboon would immediately beat them. The mandrel Typically the male mandrel is who participated and, by the way, he published this and then Yanofsky and Markowitz, 1978. You already know, mike, how much I like to say references here and talk about this. It's also in Markowitz 1978, in one of his first papers, describing this. So people would get beat by this mandrel and they'd start digging out more nickels like I need more nickels, and they'd sit there and drop nickels in until they could beat the mandrel. That was a behaviorally engineered endeavor for the mandrel. So in that Yanofsky and Markowitz paper they talked about reductions in aggression. Of all things mandrels, by the way, are incredibly. All of the baboons can show some incredible amounts of aggression among the primates And they saw reductions in aggression as a result of them engaging in this arcade like game. That was, by definition, a type of enrichment and we see some of this stuff now.

Speaker 2: 30:58

When I used to work with Sophia Yen and we boy, a decade and a half ago, we published our paper that was the result of developing the treatment train Right. We made the treatment train for sharper image. What became the manors minder, and that was Sophia and I spending a bunch of time planning that out and thinking of all the things that you know. We were consultants for sharper image. So that paper is Yin Fernandez, etc. Etc. So it's yin at all 2008.

Speaker 2: 31:30

We published that in applied animal behavior science and that was one of the goals was we wanted to deter some of these problematic behaviors. The main behavior we focused on was getting rid of some of these dogs darting out the front door, jumping on people when they arrived, barking at the door. So when the dogs would be able to hear the doorbell or somebody coming to the property, somebody knocking at the door, the owner could Give the queue for the dog to go, sit on the mat in front of the treatment train and then sit there and deliver the treats remotely, like Markowitz devices. It's a remote feeding device and we had a little remote control that you could press and the food would drop out of it. The pet tutor is a far more advanced version these days and we actually have a paper under review looking at using pet tutors in shelters And delivering food rewards to as a way to enrich.

Speaker 2: 32:28

So all of these are ways of thinking about enrichment, of enriching animal lives, and typically, there's two big components that I like to say about enrichment that are important. One is enrichment is an interaction. It's not a thing. I think we all fall in this habit of treating enrichment is a thing. Where we go. I'm giving the dog enrichment, right, i'm giving the polar bear enrichment, i'm giving the mandrel enrichment. But we have to see a change in behavior. It's an interaction, it's a contingency, so we have to see some effect on behavior. As I will say, it's not enrichment until it enriches, so we have to see an enriched effect for something to be defined as enrichment. So that's one important part.

Speaker 2: 33:20

And then the other part, and the reason why I love enrichment so much, is because, speaking of that nice meshing between learning and evolution, you have to think about all of those components. So how is the individual going to interact with these things? and then what are some of the reasons why that individual would interact with those things, right? So if I'm giving some felid, some type of cat species, whether it's a serval or leopard, whatever the felid is that I'm working with, if I'm giving them something to chase, okay, that's probably going to work better as enrichment for those individuals than it would be necessarily if I started dangling some artificial prey in front of a sloth, right In front of a three-toed sloth. Probably not going to be so, aside from the fact that they don't per date, but we're taking into account their evolutionary history, we're taking into account their species. What have they evolved to do? and that's important for evolution. What have they evolved to do? and then, how will the individual learn to do those things? What a beautiful meshing of evolutionary and learning histories.

Speaker 1: 34:39

I have so many questions and I want to jump into a little bit more into the enrichment.

Speaker 1: 34:43

I also want to jump into aggressive baboons and some of that stuff. So I'm going to take a short break to hear from our sponsors and we'll be right back to talk about those things. Hey friends, it's me again and I hope you are enjoying this episode. You may have figured out that something I deeply care about is helping dogs with aggression issues live less stressful, less confined, more enriched and, overall, happier lives with their guardians. Aggression is so often misunderstood and we can change that through education, like we receive from so many of the wonderful guests on this podcast.

Speaker 1: 35:21

In addition to the podcast, i have two other opportunities for anyone looking to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, which include the Aggression and Dogs Master Course and the Aggression and Dogs Conference. If you want to learn more about the most comprehensive course on aggression taught anywhere in the world, head on over to aggressivedogcom and click on the Dog Pros tab. And then the Master Course. The course gives you access to 23 modules on everything from assessment to safety, to medical issues, to the behavior change plans we use in a number of different cases, including lessons taught by Dr Chris Pockel, kim Brophy and Jessica Dolce. You'll also receive access to a private Facebook group with over a thousand of your fellow colleagues and dog pros all working with aggression cases. After you finish the course, you'll also gain access to a private live group mentor session portal with me where we practice working through cases together. And if you need CEUs, we've got you covered. We're approved for just about every major training and behavior credential out there. This is truly the flagship course offered on aggression and dogs, and it's perfect for pet pros that want to set themselves apart and take their knowledge and expertise to the next level, or even for pet guardians who are seeking information to help their own dog. And don't forget to join me for the fourth annual Aggression and Dogs Conference, which is happening online and in person from Chicago Illinois, september 29th through October 1st 2023. This year's lineup includes many of the amazing guests you might have heard on the podcast, including Sue Sternberg, dr Tim Lewis, dr Christine Calder, sindoor Bangal, cyrus Stremming, sean Will, masa Nishimuta and many, many more. Head on over to aggressivedogcom and click on the conference tab to learn more about the exciting agenda, from advanced concepts and veterinary behavior cases to working with aggression in shelter environments and even intra-household dog-dog aggression. And I wanted to take a moment to thank one of our sponsors for the conference.

Speaker 1: 37:27

As a family of world-class trainers, fense Dog Sports Academy provides expert and accessible instruction for competitive dog sports using the most progressive training methods and positive reinforcement techniques. Through their online platform, students are able to access professional dog training, no matter your location or pup's skill level. Fdsa believes the bond between the dog and human is a proud and life-changing partnership and they'll work with you to develop a respectful and kind relationship with your furry best friend. Check out FDSA at FENSEDogSportsAcademycom.

Speaker 1: 38:07

All right, we're back here with Eddie Fernandez. We're talking about a lot. We just got a really nice overview of enrichment and why it's important. Some of the things that are happening, eddie, is that we see trainers they're focusing almost exclusively on enrichment and the concept of enrichment in helping dogs with behavior issues. So they often recognize that a particular behavior problem, label it that as a behavior problem. It's really not a problem, but it's problematic for the client that they're solving many of these issues with just straight enrichment. So not even sometimes looking at the ABCs, they're just like this dog is needing some increased enrichment. So what are your thoughts on that Like? are you seeing that sometimes happening in other places, not in just the dog training industry, or do you think that's a really important concept for us to focus more on in the dog training industry?

Speaker 2: 39:00

Yeah, yeah, and again, i always love to throw out caveats. I think you know this as well. As much as I like to throw out references, mike, i like to throw out caveats. I like to say I mean, i am not a dog trainer, right? I'm an academic. I want your listener to keep that in mind, that I'm a scientist, i'm a welfare researcher, even though I've done practice in the past. I've worked, including with companion animals. I am not, i do not consider myself, a practitioner, i'm a scientist.

Speaker 2: 39:29

So it's always worth taking what I say with at least a little bit of grain of salt. I think everything is good taken with a grain of salt, that we be skeptical, we be empirical, we look for that evidence. So, that said, what I would say is enrichment is a really powerful tool, but we still need to consider what are the necessary components to manage behavior right? So we still need to think about how is this animal interacting with its environment? What's some of the proximate functions of that behavior? What are some of the consequences that they're receiving that will increase or decrease that behavior be likely to increase. Those are the behavior analytic components that we normally think of, and it's hard to think of a more powerful tool than operant conditioning for managing behavior, to think about all of the ways in which the potential reinforcement or punishment contingencies are involved, what trainers sometimes call the quadrants although Eileen Anderson has a really wonderful article about this, this is. Quadrants is a trainer specific term. It doesn't really come from the behavior analytic scientific community, but it's still a nice way of summarizing what it means to think about those different contingencies and how they maintain behavior.

Speaker 2: 40:51

And enrichment isn't, even though it came from that historical background, even though that's the way Markowitz really created enrichment. Today's enrichment has more of this give them something and see what happens and keep trying different things. That's the way we, most of us, think about enrichment And it doesn't necessarily take into account all the ways in which that individual, that animal, will interact with its environment to produce something. So I think it's still incredibly important that we can't just I mean, i guess we could, we could just throw out a whole bunch of things and say something will work right.

Speaker 2: 41:33

What do they call that? The spaghetti on the wall technique, right, throw enough of it and something will stick? or the shotgun approach. It's certainly a common practitioner approach, both with animals and humans. The clinical psychologist, counseling psychologist talk about that as well. Just do a whole bunch of treatments, take that shotgun approach and something will eventually work. But it's not a very efficient way And I think it helps to try to understand certainly the function of that behavior. So why is this happening, and then see if we can change those contingencies in some way.

Speaker 1: 42:10

So help me wrap my head around this and maybe you can give me an example. It doesn't have to be dogs, but maybe some of the animals you've worked with, because when we think about ABC contingencies we're often thinking like, right in that moment, so I want to get a dog to sit, and the consequences the dog getting the treat after their butt hits the ground. That's what we're often wrapping our head around when we're thinking about a positive reinforcement contingency. So what about when we're talking about enrichment and if we're incorporating it and we're looking at the behavior change? We're often thinking, okay, tomorrow or later on in the day, because the dog had some nose work or something, so we've incorporated enrichment. We're seeing a change in behavior later on. So kind of help me think that through or maybe give us an example of where you would see the behavior change, how we would track that.

Speaker 2: 43:00

Yeah, it's funny that you even mentioned nose work there, because I have an honor student that's going to be presenting a little later today on some of their work with scent work and nose work. And then there's a doctoral student that I co-supervised at her entire, all of her dissertation work, all of her research. She's currently finishing a scoping review. So that's Jade Fountain. By the way, and some of your listeners may know her as well And I'm one of her co-supervisors here. She's doing all scent work and nose work. We're primarily calling it scent work because nose work is the trademark, specific type, but there's a bunch. So I've had to jump into. A year ago my familiarity with what got called scent work was way less than it is now And I still would not consider my, because there's so much all the nefaries and then even nose work being a trademarked type of scent work. And there's stuff like Nick Rutter's work and what we've called the Rutter method for doing things like. Nick Rutter works with Melbourne Zoo and has training of dogs too for conservation purposes. Nathan Hall down at Texas, texas Tech him and Erica Furbacher out of Nathan Hall's lab just had a couple papers published on training dogs to detect lantern fly eggs. So all these things that encompass scent work boy, there's a lot, but now I'm going to drift away from that. I just wanted to mention that it's for me. I've been inundated with all of this stuff in the past year, having worked with a couple projects Now detailing scent work, and it's a great example again of trying to understand enrichment and training and those interactions. But I'm going to go back to this multi species, to the different species. I'm going to drift away from dogs I've done a bit outside there and give you an example of where enrichment can work. But understanding why it works helps us refine and get better at providing enrichment.

Speaker 2: 45:03

So in my doctorate I spent a number of years working with walruses, in about a half a decade working with polar bears, and I spent almost as long working with walruses. Walruses are amazing. They're wonderful individuals. There's not many of them in captivity. They are very difficult, in fact, to provide them with proper welfare and captivity can be incredibly difficult. So that was one of my primary purposes was just trying to improve their welfare in these captive conditions. I worked with five walruses, five different walruses. I published research with three of them. So one of the things we did was try to come up with some type of enrichment map, this enrichment device that they could forge on, because we wanted to give them foraging opportunities.

Speaker 2: 45:51

A lot of the problems we see with an enrichment often that's one of the big things is giving animals this opportunity to forage, an extra opportunity to forage, since a lot of captive problems across many different species are a result of this disconnect between how they would normally forage in the wild and how they're foraging under this condition. That's a big part of how enrichment works not always, and there's many, many types of enrichment that have nothing to do with foraging. So I don't want to make it sound like there's your answer Just go out and find ways to provide foraging for any animal that you ever encounter. But in this case, the walruses didn't have many great foraging opportunities. Well, your listeners probably, if you think about what a walrus does in the wild to forage these large mammals, very large pinnipeds. So they're pinniped. They're in the same order as seals and sea lions, so the Oda Beneday is their family, and they're the only ones in that family, by the way, because then you have the seals and sea lions. Get their two other families for the pinnipeds. So walruses get their own because they're that weird and that special.

Speaker 2: 47:10

They live off of almost nothing but clams, so these bivalves that they forge on at the bottom of the ocean floor. Now, to get a clam, what they have to do is they're swimming down in, and sometimes in pitch black darkness at the bottom of the ocean floor. So outside of Alaska, russia, greenland, places like this, they're foraging on the bottom of the ocean floor, they're running along, they're using these, what people think of as whiskers. Those are Vibrisa that they're using to try to find these bivalves, these clams, at the bottom of the ocean floor. Now, if you've ever been to a supermarket or an open market anywhere where you've seen live clams, you know this experience. If you go over and you or you've seen them in the wild, you go over and touch one and they close pretty quickly.

Speaker 2: 47:56

For a walrus, one of it. One of it Vibrisa, one of its whiskers. One of the Vibrisa contacts this clam. It has to put its mouth over that clam before it completely closes and then pull it, suction it completely out of that. They do this enough times in a day to maintain, in some cases, thousands of pounds, right Tons of weight. They can be very big. For people who have never seen a walrus, and up close they are immense. They can easily be several meters or over over 10 feet in length, so quite a large animal.

Speaker 2: 48:36

So What do you do to give an animal like that a foraging opportunity in some captive condition? Well, i can tell you what some people in the past had done. Ron Castellin did a thing where he put a bunch of rocks in a pit and the walrus would have to kind of dig around through the rocks and You know, okay, but I don't know how much that's really like sifting through sand and looking for clams. So we ended up using these very thick They were horse stall mats, but they were about a half a meter thick, about well, not quite that, actually about a third of a meter, about a foot. By the way, i'm using a lot of switching between Metric and Imperial because you know I've been in Australia for eight months now, so I'm used to saying metric and then also I'm very American, so I have to. I give everybody It's like oh, that's a third of a meter, that's a foot right, that's how thick these mats were, and We drilled holes throughout them, made this large mat.

Speaker 2: 49:37

It was something like. I think it was about a five by six foot mat in the paper I Published, which is a Fernandez and Timberlake 2019 paper. It will give the exact size, but it's a mat. That was, let's say, it's about five feet by six feet. So for non-American audience people thinking metric, it's almost two meters by two meters was the size of this mat and about a third of a meter thick And it had 25 holes in it. We put clams and fish and things that they would eat in that and then we tossed them into the water and the Wallresses came over and foraged on these mats and would pull and it worked Okay.

Speaker 2: 50:16

For a couple of the wallresses it ended up having some reductions and Stereotipes it. For one of the wallresses, it increased general activity Kind of things that we wanted to see. By the way, stereotipy I know you mentioned this word too and it's worth mentioning. We're just we're talking about a repetitive and variant behavior pattern, right? So, just in case any listeners, it's so something like a pacing and in wallresses It'll often be a circle swimming or they might engage in something like a flipper sucking. In fact, brutus, the big male wallress there at Indianapolis Zoo, often did flipper sucking, so, as opposed to Aurora, who was the larger female, she came around. It would do circle swimming. So we had some reductions and it was good, but I would say it was modest effects. And Then, about the same time that we were doing this research We were doing the research back in 2005, 2006, right around that time There were some researchers that ended up diving with wallresses in the wild.

Speaker 2: 51:21

First time that anybody had gone and seen wallresses foraging in the wild. No one had seen that. This was all what we determined about how wallresses were foraging were based on things We saw them do in captivity and then our best guesses This is what we knew about war is foraging. We're in the 21st century and no one's ever seen a war is forage in the wild. And these guys I always jokingly say they were crazy Scandinavian guys. I think they were. They might have been Danish, but anyway they were Scandinavian. They went out to Greenland and dove with wallresses and wallresses are dangerous, by the way, if that needs it's worth mentioning, they are dangerous. They went and dove with them was okay, they didn't, they didn't get hurt. But they watched them for the first time. They videoed them foraging in the wild and they saw something No one had even imagined, which was the wallresses they were watching Lifted up their flippers while they were running along the ocean floor and They started digging with their flipper at the ocean floor as they were moving along.

Speaker 2: 52:34

So they were using their flippers to dig and No one had pictured that. And then, even stranger was the fact that 90% of the wallresses were using their right flipper to dig. So so they ended up actually looking at the skeletal systems of Several different subspecies of wallresses that they got from museums and they measured again I this is I'm not an anatomist for any of the pinnipeds, seal, sea lions, wallresses Even though they don't have fingers, they still have finger bones in those flippers. They measured those. What are those metacarpals? I don't, i don't know something like somebody's gonna, somebody's laughing there. An anatomist out there is like no. But so they measured the bone lengths and, if you didn't know, based on for us, for instance, if I'm left-handed, the bones apparently I didn't know this until I read this paper the bones in my Left hand, those finger bones will be longer. And so they measured this in the wallresses and, sure enough, across the three subspecies, 90% of the wallresses, the right Finger bones in. Those flippers were longer than the left. So wallresses are just like us at the same rate. They're about 90% right-handed.

Speaker 2: 53:56

So Flash forward to what we took that information We now know we learned while we were doing these warris studies.

Speaker 2: 54:05

We learned that wallresses were using Their flippers to forge and we had modest effects with these mats.

Speaker 2: 54:13

So now we're taking in some of the natural history information of the wallresses and we said let's give them something They can manipulate with their flippers.

Speaker 2: 54:22

And it looked less natural and it was something that was already there.

Speaker 2: 54:26

But we just took some boomer balls and we drilled holes in them, these large plastic balls, and We drilled holes in them and then put clam bits Hole clams actually and some fish, sardine, things like that Inside the boomer balls and then threw a couple of them down to the wallresses.

Speaker 2: 54:46

And sure enough, the male warris, who primarily flippers sucked, would grab the boomer balls, hold it in place and rotate it and Spin it around and pull the fish out. And the female warris, aurora, would grab the the boomer ball and start manipulating with her flipper, but she'd start pushing it over along the water and she'd pull it underwater and Spin it while she was pushing it underwater and the young male warris There was a adolescent male warris named Narius would follow her along and do some little manipulating as well. So they were both using it in ways that Was related to how they've evolved, how they naturally forage in the wild, but then also particular to the ways those Individuals, that variability for the individual and what they've learned, how they've learned to forage one holding it in place and Manipulating it that way, the other moving it along.

Speaker 1: 55:50

That's, i think, a great example of the importance of understanding both those evolutionary and learned histories for Managing behavior you paint such a vivid picture of it like I know more about warris is now that I ever have my life. But it also shows, you know, we're just scratching the surface sometimes when we're talking about enrichment and you know, and we have to really do our homework, i guess you could say, of learning how it needs to be appropriate for a particular species and even maybe the particular individual, especially when we start talking about dogs. It's just Yeah. There's so much I I Want to keep diving into, but I also wanted to talk about, you know, again, going back to multiple species in the, you know, the topic of aggression, kind of shifting gears here a little bit but The function of aggression, or just from an evolution and going back to the evolutionary aspect of if it being helping Species or animals survive, but the levels, you know.

Speaker 1: 56:50

what fascinates me too is thinking about how, or the types of aggressive behaviors, different species, this is, you know, getting it as you were talking, i was kind of juggling some of these thoughts in my head to like, for instance, a praying mantis, you know just playing aggression versus you know some other animals that maybe they're level of aggression, or what we as humans would perceive as a level of aggression in terms of severity, or barbaric or grotesque or however you want to label it.

Speaker 1: 57:16

It's gonna differ so much by species but it's all meant to survive, right, it's all meant as a spouse. So so talk us through that maybe for the last. You know a little bit here and then, and why it's so important for us as humans to understand, you know, seeing it through this lens of science, but also to understand that Well, you know why our dogs might display aggressive behavior, and at different levels. So big question lots of think about there.

Speaker 2: 57:53

This is why we have this is why we have such fun interacting and talking, is Because, just like we've done before, we think about these things and it's all these different levels And it's really fun to try to unpack that and think about that from those different perspectives. So, that said, i'm gonna start and reverse a little bit and say one of the things that becomes most important for us in Understanding aggression is being able to understand those displays. I think all all your listeners are, i would hope, are empathetic at some level to this, including the precursors, right. That's incredibly and important for companion animals and those are things there are in most forms of aggression across species. Animals will engage in behaviors. They will display certain signs that Allow them to be efficient. It's expensive, it is costly to engage in aggression. You can get hurt, it consumes a lot of energy. So most animals will do things to display something to say hey, you know, this is what I do before I aggress and it's important to understand those signs. I ended up learning many of those on the fly by. I ended up working with a big cat sanctuary, one of the first exotic animal facilities I worked with over two decades ago. I worked with a place that I won't bother giving the name here but for lack of a better day. It was in Texas. It was a big cat sanctuary. They were breeding tigers. It was as close to Tiger King esque as we can get and this was one of.

Speaker 2: 59:38

As somebody who was trying to break into the field And working with exotic animals as a brand new graduate student I was looking for this was one of the few facilities I got to work with was hey, they're gonna let us come in and do these behavior change protocols and We can work with the tigers. Well, you, i was going into enclosures with full grown Bengal tigers, so I was having free contact with Bengal tigers, including white Bengal tigers. I was having protected contact with some of them as well. I had minimally protected contact with lions, with mountain lions, with leopards and with tigers, and I had free contact, complete free contact, with adult tigers, which is I strongly recommend. Do not do that. It's incredibly dangerous. It's silly. I look back on that now and I can't think of something. It's one of the dumbest things I can think of that I've done in my animal career, but I didn't know any better. Right, i was trusting the facility and I said I want to do that. I was very motivated to work with these animals And I have a long history of being in somebody who you know grew up chasing animals as a kid, that I've been in a lot of odd animal situations throughout my life, as many people who have worked with a lot of different animals have been, so it wasn't that strange to me. But tigers are incredibly dangerous.

Speaker 2: 1:01:04

So what I had to learn pretty quickly were some of the signs that tigers would give. Some of those, including warning signs that they may give for an indication that you may see some, and in some cases it's not even aggression, it's predation. I had tigers try to predate on me and you had to learn those signs as well. So whether it's stalking, whether it's some of the dilation of eyes, the tail flick in a tiger, you see some little things like that. Anybody who's worked with tigers in any form protected or free contact learns the chuff, as they learn with a lot of other cats where they give this greeting. So that's worth knowing as well. So I had to start learning some of these little signs of what might tell me that there could be some aggression Now with tigers.

Speaker 2: 1:01:57

A lot of it is just there, often is not many signals because it can be more related to predation than it is aggression, but dogs give many, many, many signals. In many cases, in fact, when we typically see a lot and I'm sure you would know far more about this, mike, than I would, but I would think that this is where you start to see a lot of the bigger problems with dogs is when we don't see those signals and they just right. So you get a bite and it's, but I think a lot of the time probably what you're more familiar with is that people just didn't read the signals, that the signals were being given, but they didn't read those. So that becomes an incredibly important component. It's just understanding, from both the species and individual level, what are the signs of aggression, what are the precursors to that aggressive response, and I think that's incredibly important. What other part of this did you want to go into, for?

Speaker 1: 1:03:00

Yeah, I think you're covering a lot of it right now is one of the most important aspects is the communication aspect and getting people to understand that that animals are going to often communicate, with plenty of signals. We see it in like, but humans don't understand animals most of the time. We see it in Yellowstone Park all the time, right People going up to moose staring them and not seeing all the signals, Probably not the best idea you know, because it's different than something scary like a grizzly bear.

Speaker 1: 1:03:27

I mean, we kind of know to keep our space, but at least most of us do from certain animals. But that's the interesting thing is that I think that's one of the issues with dogs, right? Is that a lot of people are just like let me just go up to every dog and they're expected to just deal with us.

Speaker 2: 1:03:42

Right, right, incredible, right, and that's a lot of it is the education we provide to individuals about learning some of those signs, about how to think, about how I mean I can't think of any animal that I ever approach that I offer them some version of approach, regardless of the level of contact. It's their choice to interact with me And I think that's true of I don't know an animal person that doesn't do that same thing. Whether they know it or not, they give the animal the choice to interact, because that's such a dangerous situation to take that choice away from an animal, especially a dog. But it's incredible. We see kids learning that right, where children have no idea. They go up, they hug, they grab these dogs, these cats, and then we see the unfortunate result of that, in many cases, incredibly dangerous.

Speaker 2: 1:04:40

Yeah, there's a lot of that. That's very important, i think, the choices we give the communication, understanding those signals. So, yeah, And then how do we understand that? How do we define again, i always look to data, i look to what do we know from research about some of these forms of communication? In some cases and I don't know how much success you've had with this mic or whether this is something that you or your listeners do? do you ever work with dogs, that you try to give them some type of signal as a precursor to aggression, or is that something that you would do?

Speaker 1: 1:05:18

Do you mean like a cue that something bad's about to happen?

Speaker 2: 1:05:24

Yeah, so if you have a dog that is engaging in aggressive behavior and this is, by the way, this is how naive I am in dealing with this with aggressive dogs under these conditions, is there ever a time that you might give them a cue, give them a response right So they can opt out of a situation instead of engaging in aggression, so that can end up being their precursor? So we think of growling, we think of some of the other typical responses that we might see that are precursors. But is there something you might train them to, choose right, so they can do something like I don't know, it could be a contrived response, right, they could do a little bark or something like that.

Speaker 1: 1:06:10

Yeah, we do it all the time technically when we're looking at differential reinforcement strategies. That's what you're thinking about. So teaching the dog an alternative choice. So instead of grumbling, snarling, biting, go to station, figure something else out and we'll reinforce that. But we could also cue that, or we can make it the environmental cue where that stimulus coming into the picture is the cue to go to station. So there's different ways that we've kind of navigated that issue. But yeah, right, i think that's answering the question.

Speaker 2: 1:06:41

Yeah, yeah, that's getting at some of it. I was trying to think of something that's a little bit more like I was even thinking about like Ava and Emily's work and with start buttons and thinking are there start buttons for aggression that you could train. Sure, yeah, and it's right.

Speaker 1: 1:06:55

That's always the goal, right, that's something that you do, we want to see desirable behaviors for us humans in what we're observing before we see any kind of aggressive response, because that also keeps the dog less stressed. If we're going to put a label on that.

Speaker 2: 1:07:09

But if we're going to help the dog feel more comfortable, then yeah, we're going to look at some other strategy for the dog to choose from That gives them agency and control on the environment right, absolutely Yeah, that choice and control is such a critical component And that's one of the things that I always find aside from trying to punish aggression in some way, and we didn't even get to dive too much into that. But there's people like Nate Aserin who has spent more time studying punishment in the lab than anyone else, and some of the things they found for instance, aggression breeding, aggression, common saying right comes from a lot of the learning literature. It's self in how difficult, how problematic it can be to try to punish aggression. But seeing people punish precursors to aggression, i think that's to me some of the scariest stuff that I've seen, where somebody you know dog growls and somebody tries to deter the growling And I'm thinking do you just want them to immediately go to a bite?

Speaker 1: 1:08:16

That seems like the next step. Yeah, it's like yelling at somebody, for you know, just saying something like, hey, knock it off instead of pulling out a gun, right, we want them to say nice things, or at least tell us what the problem is, rather than going resorting to the extreme strategies of violence, you know, yeah, yeah, Yeah, somebody saying, hey, could you please quit?

Speaker 2: 1:08:41

it is a lot better than somebody walking into the room and screaming, right, And we teach children these things, right, we say, hey, what's your appropriate response for this? And we give them options to opt out. And the interesting example the cross species, examples I have for things like this. What I've always found interesting and where we see some of the individual stuff, are the elephants, and I've had lots of protected contact And then I've had free contact with both African and Asian elephants as well, and it's always interesting. African elephants in particular have a number of species, typical signs they give for things like aggression, ears out, different responses they'll have There's. It's hard not to see. You see the African elephant, you're like that's danger, that's a problem. But I've had some interesting individual interactions, even with African elephants where they've done things like.

Speaker 2: 1:09:37

I can still remember there was an African elephant that I was trying to take a picture of it eating from my hand. So it was grabbing food from my hand. But in the process of trying to take the picture I was moving my hand around, so the elephant had its trunk and it was trying to follow my hand and it was getting annoyed, right, i was not paying attention because I was looking at the. You know, i was, and this was silly. You would think somebody who's spent time around elephants would say oh, but no, i, i let my guard down and I was just not paying attention to the elephant behavior And the elephant was fortunately this was a female African elephant was very nice.

Speaker 2: 1:10:15

So she just looked at me, put her trunk in my face and blew air straight into my face. That was her quitted, you know, and I I immediately stopped and she grabbed the carrots and ate the carrots and we were all good. But I just thought that was incredibly polite because it was way nicer than grabbing my hand or pulling me off the wall. That was on a wall at her, at her head height, but there was still it was minimally protected contact. In that case, very nice precursor to any form of escalated Definitely a nice alternative to two other choices elephant could have made.

Speaker 2: 1:10:56

Right.

Speaker 1: 1:10:57

Right. So so, to wrap things up here, if you had one word that describes why this is from a multi species perspective because I can think of words that I use for when a dog is displaying aggression what they're seeking, what the sort of motivation or the function really of of that behavior, that aggressive behavior? But if you look at all species, what would be that word you choose? Is it safety, survival, is it evolution? Is it distance?

Speaker 2: 1:11:24

Yeah, can I choose two words for the two big Ys?

Speaker 1: 1:11:29

Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:11:30

So I think, if we think about it as the two big Ys from an evolutionary perspective, it's just that it's survival, right. It's fitness, so it's survival, it's something along those lines. So survival, let's go with that. And from an individual level, so from what's being learned, it's escape, right. So a lot of time, aggression is meant to get rid of something, so it's negatively reinforced. So, whether that's you know, get you out of my territory, get you away from my food, get you away from me. much of the time, at the individual level, it's escape.

Speaker 1: 1:12:12

And that's a big point to make when you're talking about using aversives and training And when that dog is trying to escape that aversive and we're applying it and what they might resort to if we don't stop So right. Good way to wrap up this show, but I do want to give the listeners a chance to hear more about what you're up to, as well as where they can find more information about you.

Speaker 2: 1:12:37

Well, it's usually pretty easy to find me If you search for me on ResearchGate. If you type in Eduardo J Fernandez, eduardo Fernandez, into Google Scholar, type it in Eduardo Fernandez Zoo, eduardo Fernandez Animal. Eduardo Fernandez Dog, companion, animal, cat, you'll get lots of stuff that'll easily pop up. I'm easy to find on Facebook, eduardo J Fernandez. Our lab is abwalcom. It's the Animal Behavior, welfare and Anthrosology Lab. So abwalcom, abwalcom, and that has all the links to me on Twitter, instagram, there's Facebook And I have a still relatively new it's a few month old group on Facebook, the Applied Ethology Facebook group. I also have the Animal Reinforcement Forum there, ARF. But the Applied Ethology Group is really delving deeper into both of the evolutionary and learning histories as they are applied to animal behavior. So it's a good way to help you get, as I like to say, bilingual in understanding animal behavior, understanding the evolutionary and learning histories.

Speaker 1: 1:13:51

I like the way you put that bilingual I'm going to have to steal that for sure. And as always, folks, I'll be sure to link all of those links in the show notes for you to check out. Eddie, thank you so much. It's been always wonderful chatting with you.

Speaker 2: 1:14:06

Yeah, no, this is wonderful. This was really great. So thank you, mike. This is a. I'm looking forward to getting to hear more.

Speaker 1: 1:14:14

Great. I hope you enjoyed this fun conversation with Eddie as much as I did, And I appreciate you tuning in to hear more about the science of aggression in a variety of species as well. And don't forget to head on over to aggressivedogcom for more information about helping dogs with aggression, From the aggression in dogs master course to webinars from world renowned experts and even an annual conference. We have options for both pet pros and pet owners to learn more about aggression in dogs. And also don't forget about the help for dogs with aggression bonus episodes that you can subscribe to. These are solo shows where I walk you through how to work with a variety of types of aggression, such as resource guarding, dog to dog aggression, territorial aggression, fear based aggression and much, much more. You can find a link to subscribe in the show notes or by hitting the subscribe button if you're listening in on Apple podcasts. Thanks for listening and stay well, my friends.