Friday, July 31, 2009

Ban of ear cropping, tail docking and debarking

At last! I'm jazzed to read about this!


Banfield pet hospitals ban tail docking, ear cropping on dogs
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Banfield, The Pet Hospital, the nation's largest network of animal hospitals, has announced it will no longer do tail docking, ear cropping or devocalization on dogs.

Headquartered in Portland, Ore., Banfield is the nation's largest general veterinary practice, with more than 730 hospitals and 2,000 veterinarians nationwide.

Devocalization, or de-barking, is a rare procedure and has long been controversial. It involves the full or partial removal of a dog's vocal chords to keep it from barking.

Tail docking and ear cropping, both quite common, have become more controversial over the past few years. Last year, the American Veterinary Medical Association passed a resolution opposing ear cropping and tail docking of dogs, "when done solely for cosmetic purposes," and encouraging the elimination of ear cropping and tail docking from breed standards.

Banfield has come out strongly against the procedures.

"After thoughtful consideration and reviewing medical research, we have determined it is in the best interest of the pets we treat, as well as the overall practice, to discontinue performing these unnecessary cosmetic procedures," says Karen Faunt, vice president for medical quality advancement. "It is our hope that this new medical protocol will help reduce, and eventually eliminate, these cosmetic procedures altogether."

The hospitals will continue to carry out the surgeries on pets for which it is medically necessary, she says.

There have been numerous attempts in several states, most recently Illinois, New York and Vermont, to outlaw the practice of tail docking and ear cropping. The American Kennel Club has fought such laws.

In statements opposing them, the AKC says that "as prescribed in certain breed standards, (they) are acceptable practices integral to defining and preserving breed character, enhancing good health and preventing injuries," and that "any inference that these procedures are cosmetic and unnecessary is a severe mischaracterization that connotes a lack of respect and knowledge of history and the function of purebred dogs."

Gina Spadafori, an editor at the website PetConnection.com, says that tail docking is still fairly common, in part because it's done within days of birth. Ear cropping, which is generally done when the puppy is between 12 and 14 weeks old, is fading, in part because "people are not comfortable seeing their puppies taped up like that."

Both docking and cropping have gone out of fashion in Europe, she says. In the USA, many breeders of show dogs "would happily stop doing it if they thought they could still win in the ring."

Thursday, July 23, 2009

What is a behavior?

When ‘What Animals Do’ Doesn’t Seem to Cover It
Serge Bloch

New York Times
Published: July 20, 2009

Certain things should never be taken for granted, among them your spouse, your mother, the United States Constitution, and the precise meaning of words that are at the heart of your profession.

Daniel Levitis was working as a teaching assistant for an animal behavior course at the University of California in Berkeley, and on the first day of class, the professor explained that the shorthand definition of a “behavior” is “what animals do.”

O.K., that’s the freshman-friendly definition, Mr. Levitis thought. Now how about the unabridged, professional version? What is the point-by-point definition of a behavior that behavioral biologists use when judging whether a particular facet of the natural world falls under their purview? After all, animals digest food and grow fur, yet few behavioral researchers would count such physiological and anatomical doings as behaviors.

Mr. Levitis asked the professor for the full definition of a behavior. She referred him to their textbook, with its promising title, “Animal Behavior.” To his surprise, neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to spell it out. “It was assumed that everyone knew what the word meant,” said Mr. Levitis, who is completing his doctorate at Berkeley.

Mr. Levitis decided to ask the people who should know best: working behavioral biologists. The provocative and crisply written results of his quest, carried out with his colleagues, William Lidicker Jr. and Glenn Freund, appear in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour. Among the highlights of the report: biologists don’t agree with one another on what a behavior is; biologists don’t agree with themselves on what a behavior is; biologists can be as parochial as the rest of us, meaning that animal behaviorists tend to reflexively claim the behavior label for animals only, while botanists sniff that, if the well-timed unfurling of a smelly, colorful blossom for the sake of throwing your seed around isn’t the ultimate example of a behavior, then there’s no such thing as Valentine’s Day; and, finally, words may count, but thoughts do not.

The researchers acknowledged that biologists had not been crying out for a canonical definition of the term. Marlene Zuk, an animal behaviorist at the University of California at Riverside, contrasted that casual attitude with the often acrid debates now under way on how to define the term species. “What you think a species is means a lot for the way you think about evolution,” she said. But with behavior, she added, “there doesn’t seem to be an existential crisis.” Then again, nothing can be more insidious than the wallflower you ignore.

Walter D. Koenig of Cornell University, who helped Mr. Levitis in the early stages of the project, said his interest was piqued when he moved from the study of bird behavior to an investigation of the birds’ primary food supplier, oak trees. Why is it that trees dispersed over great distances end up releasing their acorns, or masting, en masse, he wondered. “Are the trees responding to something produced by other trees?” he said. “It’s entirely possible.” And if you designate this sort of inter-arboreal chemistry a behavior, he added, “it ends up pushing the boundaries” of what you think plants can do.

To perform their linguistic investigation, the researchers composed an online survey with two basic parts. In the first, they presented 13 “potentially diagnostic” statements about behavior, compiled from their sweep through the scientific literature, with which respondents could either concur or not. “Behavior always involves movement,” for example, and “is always an action, rather than a lack of action.” Or, “behaviors are always the actions of individuals, not groups” and “something whole individuals do, not organs or parts that make up an individual.” Or, “a developmental change is not a behavior.”

In the second part, Mr. Levitis and his co-workers offered 20 instances of natural phenomena and asked, Behavior, yea, nay or can’t say? “A sponge pumps water to gather food,” for example, or “a plant bends its leaves toward a light source” or “a beetle is swept away by a strong current.” Does a flock of geese flying in V formation count as a behavior? How about when a person decides not to do anything tomorrow in the event of rain, or when a female ant that is physiologically capable of laying eggs doesn’t do so because she’s not a queen? (If you’d like to take the survey and see how your responses compare with scientists’ and other readers’, please go to nytimes.com/science. Warning, spoilers ahead.)

Nearly all of the items were designed as borderline cases that tested the validity of one or more statements in the first half of the survey. “Flocks of geese fly in V formation,” for instance, contradicted the notion that behaviors are the actions of individuals rather than of groups. A person deciding on inactivity in the event of rain and an ant forgoing reproduction because she’s not royalty both flouted the premise that a behavior is always an action. One offering, “a spider builds a web,” contradicted none of the 13 stipulations about behavior and thus served as an experimental control.

Tallying results from 174 respondents, the researchers found an impressive lack of accord. “We didn’t have complete consensus for any item on the survey,” said Mr. Levitis, and that includes the little eight-legged control spinning its web. There were some harmonic notes. All but one participant deemed geese flying in V formation to be a legitimate behavior, while more than 95 percent turned thumbs down to the beetle swept away in a stream.

Amusingly, more than half the scientists contradicted themselves, some of them multiple times, by designating as behaviors items on the second list that defied the set of rules they had chosen from the first list.

Despite the overall lack of concordance, the researchers sought to extract from the results a trial definition for a word their peers bandy about with abandon. As they pitch it, a behavior is the internally coordinated response that an individual or a group makes to a stimulus. The response can be action or lack of action. The stimulus can come from inside or out. By this definition, masting oak trees, bacterial colonies creeping across a sugar gradient, zebra herds fissioning and fusing, are all displaying behaviors. Dogs that bark are behaving, dogs that obey a trainer’s signal and choose not to bark are most definitely behaving.

Yet a favorite human sport fails to meet the new lexical guidelines. Thinking, it seems, is not a behavior. If you think about going for a walk and then go for a walk, that’s a behavior. If you think about going for a walk but then decide it’s too cold, that’s a behavior. Walk or not, just make up your mind. It don’t mean a thing till you get off that

Friday, July 10, 2009

Wicked Mylar Must Die!

I love watching my dog on the hunt! This may be loud, so turn down the volume eh?

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Songbirds Reveal How Practice Improves Performance


ScienceDaily (2009-07-06) -- Learning complex skills like playing an instrument requires a sequence of movements that can take years to master. Last year, neuroscientists reported that by studying the chirps of tiny songbirds, they were able to identify how two distinct brain circuits contribute to this type of trial-and-error learning in different stages of life.

Now, the researchers have gained new insights into a specific mechanism behind this learning. In a paper being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of July 6, the scientists report that as zebra finches fine-tune their songs, the brain initially stores improvements in one brain pathway before transferring this learned information to the motor pathway for long-term storage.

The work could further our understanding of the complicated circuitry of the basal ganglia, brain structures that play a key role in learning and habit formation in humans. The basal ganglia are also linked to disorders like Parkinson's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug addiction.

"Birds provide a great system to study the fundamental mechanisms of how the basal ganglia contributes to learning," said senior author Michale Fee, an investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. "Our results support the idea that the basal ganglia are the gateway through which newly acquired information affects our actions."

Young zebra finches learn to sing by mimicking their fathers, whose song contains multiple syllables in a particular sequence. Like the babbling of human babies, young birds initially produce a disorganized stream of tones, but after practicing thousands of times they master the syllables and rhythms of their father's song. Previous studies with finches have identified two distinct brain circuits that contribute to this behavior. A motor pathway is responsible for producing the song, and a separate pathway is essential for learning to imitate the father. This learning pathway, called the anterior forebrain pathway (AFP), has similarities to basal ganglia circuits in humans.

"For this study, we wanted to know how these two pathways work together as the bird is learning," explained first author Aaron Andalman, a graduate student in Fee's lab. "So we trained the birds to learn a new variation in their song and then we inactivated the AFP circuit to see how it was contributing to the learning."

To train the birds, researchers monitored their singing and delivered white noise whenever a bird sang a particular syllable at a lower pitch than usual.

"The bird hears this unexpected noise, thinks it made a 'mistake', and on future attempts gradually adjusts the pitch of that syllable upward to avoid repeating that error," Fee said. "Over many days we can train the bird to move the pitch of the syllable up and down the musical scale."

On a particular day, after four hours of training in which the birds learned to raise the pitch, the researchers temporarily inactivated the AFP with a short-acting drug (tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin that comes from the puffer fish). The pitch immediately slipped back to where it had been at the start of that day's training session — suggesting that the recently learned changes were stored within the AFP.

Listen to the birds adjust the pitch of their song here: http://web.mit.edu/feelab/media/andalmanandfee.html

But the researchers found that over the course of 24 hours, the brain had transferred the newly learned information from the AFP to the motor pathway. The motor pathway was storing all of the accumulated pitch changes from previous training sessions.

Fee compares the effect to how recent edits to a document are temporarily stored in a computer's dynamic memory and then saved regularly to the hard drive. It is the accumulation of changes in the motor pathway "hard drive" that constitutes the development of a new skill.

The NIH and Friends of McGovern Institute supported this research.


Miniature Schnauzer saves woman from attacker | WCNC.com | Local News for Charlotte, North Carolina | Local News

Miniature Schnauzer saves woman from attacker | WCNC.com | Local News for Charlotte, North Carolina | Local News

Shared via AddThis

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Friday, July 3, 2009

Choices - Inspiration and motivation

"Choices - Inspiration and motivation"


I found this at just this perfect time. Inspiration and motivation can always be used, eh?

http://www.idiotproofhomebiz.com
Highly inspiring slideshow with beautiful scenery about the choices we make in our life.
I hope you will be inspired to make your life a masterpiece.
If you believe in limitations you will have them but if you believe you can do anything you can. So why not choose the best.
I hope you make the best possible choices for you. What ever you do - go for it and give it ALL you've got.

Patrick Powers
6

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Is your world flat? Does your sun revolve around your earth? Then MAYBE your dog can be trained with "Alpha Dog" techniques!
I had to put my two cents in on this whole Alpha Dog Stuff and Nonsense. I just couldn't stay quiet any longer...but don't worry, I'm not whispering!