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  • 1.  Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 03-29-2022 10:00 AM

    Updated 3/31 at 12:34pm PT - Recording is now available to watch on-demand in Maddie's University. You can complete a quiz about this session to earn CAWA, NACA and RACE CE:  Maddie's Fund: Big Dog Master Class Block 1 - A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters


    Keynote address:
    Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters.
    Presented by Janis Bradley, MA, Director of Communications & Publications, National Canine Research Council

    Please use this thread to ask follow-up questions to our presenters about this session. Any questions that we don't get a chance to answer during the live Q&A session will be answered here.

    portrait of Janis Bradley

    Janis holds a B.A. in Philosophy and a Masters in English. She first pursued a career as a college teacher, counselor, and administrator.  Leaving academia, she then took up professionally her passion for the human-canine relationship. From 2000 through 2009, Janis trained more than 400 professional pet dog trainers.

    Janis is the co-author of the articles: “No better than flipping a coin: Reconsidering canine behavior evaluations in animal shelters” “Who is minding the bibliography? Daisy chaining, dropped leads, and other bad behavior using examples from the dog bite literature,” and “Defaming Rover: Error-Based Latent Rhetoric in the Medical Literature on Dog Bites”She is also the author of Dogs Bite, But Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous (James and Kenneth), the complete guide to research on dog bites; Dog Bites: Problems and Solutions (Animals and Society Institute); and The Relevance of Breed in Selecting a Companion Dog (National Canine Research Council Vision Series). All of this comes from an abiding interest in finding the very best information about the remarkable relationship between dogs and people. She lives in California with her rescued Greyhounds.


    #Behavior,TrainingandEnrichment
    #CaseManagement*
    #Conferences,WorkshopsandWebcasts
    #DataandTechnology
    #EducationandTraining
    #Behavior,TrainingandEnrichment
    #CaseManagement*
    #Conferences,WorkshopsandWebcasts
    #DataandTechnology
    #EducationandTraining

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    alison gibson
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  • 2.  RE: Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 03-29-2022 06:10 PM
    Resources for Session 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters – Janis Bradley


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    Christie Keith
    Maddie's Million Pet Challenge
    Davisburg, Michigan
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  • 3.  RE: Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 03-30-2022 01:08 PM
    Question from attendee: At the start of the day, there was a reference to the importance of enrichment over behavior support. I'd love to understand more about that.

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    Christie Keith
    Maddie's Million Pet Challenge
    Davisburg, Michigan
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  • 4.  RE: Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 03-30-2022 01:15 PM
    Question from attendee: Where is the statistics that only 1% of dogs are dangerous?

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    Christie Keith
    Maddie's Million Pet Challenge
    Davisburg, Michigan
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  • 5.  RE: Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 03-30-2022 01:16 PM
    Question from attendee: I'm surprised we haven't heard more about breed-labeling. Is the jury still out on whether this negatively impacts a dog's ability to be adopted and the sheer innaccuracy in guessing breeds?

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    Christie Keith
    Maddie's Million Pet Challenge
    Davisburg, Michigan
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  • 6.  RE: Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 04-16-2022 10:35 AM
    Breed labeling was not a topic of the papers I was presenting in this talk, although there are certainly applications to it.  I say this because when you unpack what we were looking at in 3 papers, it relates to bias (mostly seeing dogs living in shelters as defective and requiring scrutiny not contemplated for dogs acquired from any other source). Bias is the primary outcome of breed labeling. The jury is not out on this. Many shelters have abandoned the practice without detriment to metrics like live release rate or length of stay.  Breed labeling inevitably leads to unfounded expectations, both negative and positive, both of which can influence how the dog is treated in the shelter and can do harm to future relationships or even prevent them. Moreover, since most dogs living in shelters are mixed breeds, and most people have no inkling of the vastly randomizing genetic effect of even a tiny step out of the closed gene pools we call breeds, breed labeling is false advertising at best

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    JANIS BRADLEY
    Director of Publications and Communications
    National Canine Research Council
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  • 7.  RE: Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 04-16-2022 10:35 AM
    I'm not sure what specific statement you're referring to here, as I rarely attach labels like "dangerous" to dogs, and made only 1 such reference in the talk, not in a statistical context, but I'll venture a guess. I said that 1 dog in about 220 in a given population (whether or not the dog has ever resided in a shelter) will deliver a bite sometime in his or her life that motivates the person bitten to seek treatment at an Emergency Department. One might then take this as a surrogate threshold for "dangerous," although it actually works out to less than .5%.  It comes from the CDC's WISQARS database, which tracks ED treatment by injury modality, and is the only such resource that has been collecting this data consistently for more than 2 decades.  It's openly available for anybody to search, using lots of sorting criteria. Since the huge majority of these injuries are very minor (I'm talking bandaid level here), "dangerous" may be an overstatement, if you ascribe to my concept of the term as a dog who inflicts a seriously injurious bite--most of these would not qualify. If you want to define "dangerous," for whatever purpose (usually means culling, but can mean behavior mod) as any dog who will at some time in the future inflict such a bite at some time in the future, there exists, to my knowledge, no feasible way to do this. It brings to my irreverent mind, that Tome Cruise movie called "Minority Report," will a similar likely outcome, for 2 reasons, both springing from the Guy, et.al.,  papers published in 2000.  41% of the dogs in that data, growled, snarled, snapped, or bit a familiar person at some point, and that didn't even include those behavior when directed at an unfamiliar person. So if you presume that the entire population of dogs who bite injuriously is contained within this conservatively speaking half of all pet dogs(and this is by no means established, BTW), you would have to eliminate a staggering number of dogs to "capture" those who ever go on to actually hurt someone. 
    In any case, I hope I have addressed the question you were referring to.

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    JANIS BRADLEY
    Director of Publications and Communications
    National Canine Research Council
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  • 8.  RE: Big Dog Master Class Block 1: Irreconcilable differences? Maybe not! A new look at 50 years of data about behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters

    Posted 04-16-2022 10:35 AM
    I'm not sure what specific statement you're referencing but will take a stab at what I think you may be referring to--several possibilities.  I said something about providing opportunities for real life activities as more important for the general population in shelters than spending those same human resources on behavior mod.  What I had in mind were activities like walks, play groups, and simply hanging out with people, ideally in a space that allows for ordinary human/dog play, since the latter gets you a lot of bang for your buck. Not only does the dog get stimulation, exercise, and socialization by, say, playing fetch with a shelter person (perhaps I should say, "person working in a shelter!"), but this is one of a very few scientifically validated interactions between dogs and potential adopters that increase the odds that the person will actually adopt the dog after a get acquainted session. 
    Spending time on formal behavior mod for mundane behaviors (e.g, jumpy mouthy behavior, pulling on leash, mild to moderate resource guarding etc.) even if they yield significant behavior change in the shelter, correlate poorly with things that are actual relationship breakers for dogs living in homes, so the justification of spending resources on them that could be spent on normalizing the environment until the dog can be placed in a foster or permanent home is weak. The only exceptions would be that very small number of dogs who are not currently placeable because of a history of seriously injurious bites or uninterruptedly threatening behavior toward people. Intensive behavior mod may help these dogs, if the shelter has the resources (behavior mod professionals on staff or as board and train fosters) and elects to do so. 
    Finally, if a shelter decides they want to install basic manners in their charges (keeping "4 on the floor" to be leashed up, waiting at doors, maintaining a loose leash, etc), they can be done through basic behavioral hygiene implemented during the real life enrichment activities, but the people providing the enrichment have to be trained to do this.  
    If you have other questions, or I'm off the topic you were looking for here, just let me know.
    Thanks for your interest.

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    JANIS BRADLEY
    Director of Publications and Communications
    National Canine Research Council
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