Ep51 Clive Wynne on helping shelter dogs, canine cognition and human-dog relationships
Clive Wynne is the founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. He is also the Director of Research at Wolf Park in the USA and the author of many books, including his latest ‘Dog is Love’.
Clive is from Britain and he was inspired to study animals while he was studying in London. Later, he went to University of Edinburgh to study for a PhD and further studied animal behaviour and minds, psychology and cognition.
Afterwards, Clive had the opportunity to study the behaviour of marsupials in Australia. Then, he went to University of Florida, where he developed a keen interest in animal-human relationship, especially that of dogs and humans, and he then expanded this context to other canines.
When speaking of his past and current research interests, Clive starts by talking about the issues of animal shelters in the US, and in particular dogs. As the number of euthanasia cases in shelters have decreased in the past few years, dogs and other shelter animals now often live in unsuitable environments with limited resources. Hence, Clive dedicated himself to the research of helping shelter dogs find new homes. He finds it interesting that people who are planning to adopt a dog don’t necessarily know what kind of dog they want. In addition, he also discovered which behaviours that have the greatest impact on the chance of adoption.
Clive shares that there is a lack of knowledge of dogs that are not human pets and emphasised how the understanding of dog-dog social relationship, in for example feral dogs, can benefit the studies in human-dog relationship.
Continuing, Clive states that dogs have exceptional cognition and special ways to understand people, and gives an example of a project that proposed that dogs are the only species known to understand human pointing gestures. Although other past research showed that wolves do not seem to understand pointing gestures like dogs do, the results of Clive’s testing in the Wolf Park indicates differently. Clives states, “The processes of learning are amazingly similar across many different animals. You get different outcomes because different individuals have different experiences in life.”
Moreover, Clive explained how the bonds dogs and other canine species form with humans can definitely act as a kind of social enrichment. However, Clive believes that dogs and other canine species simply see us as social companions.
Clive mentions an example of differential reinforcement of alternative behaviours through the use of remote controlled feeding device to train dogs to reduce their barking while their humans are not at home.
At the end of the podcast, Clive shared some of his future goals. In terms of basic science, he wants to explore and find out more about how dogs view us, their experience with humans and even dog-dog social relationships. On the practical side, he wants to focus on a foster project that aims to not only provide shelter dogs with more opportunities to form social bonds with people but also build a community for both humans and dogs to learn more about each other.
Learn more about Clive Wynne' work HERE
Learn more about Wolf Park HERE
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