Mindfulness is the ability we all have to be fully present in the moment and aware of out surroundings. Mindfulness means having a constant awareness of the present, whilst non-judgementally experiencing our thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and surroundings. Mindfulness is essential for effective animal training as it not only ensures that we are aware of the subtleties of the animal’s behaviour so that our training is accurate, but also keep us safe through an increased awareness of our surrounding and the animals reaction to it.
When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts focus on what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than revisiting the past or imagining the future. There are three core elements are important for mindfulness to be successful: intention, attention, and attitude (Shapiro & Carlson, 2009; 2014). Intention is informed by what is our aim, vision or aspiration is for this time; it is what you hope to get from practising mindfulness. Attention requires us to be fully aware and tuned into the present moment, rather than being preoccupied with the past or future. Finally, how we attend to the present, our attitude, should be open, kind, and curious. Each element supports the others.
Meditation aims to train awareness, focus and perspective through mental exercises. Mindful mediation is the practice of being aware of the unconditional truth of the present without judgement. Most mindful meditation techniques focus on aspects of body, breath and thought awareness during a period of quiet sitting.
A recent study has found that just 40 days of mindfulness meditation training can change the structure of your brain and improve your quality of life. The results centred on the parietal cortex with a relative increase in cortical thickness in the left precuneus. Furthermore, in the upper left parietal cortex and bilateral inferior parietal lobe, cortical thickness increased in the left inferior temporal gyrus after 40 days. Participants also report decreases symptoms of depression and trait anxiety after the mindfulness training.
This article is super interesting for two reasons. One, the complexity of olfactory social cues in many animals is fascinating and seems to create a world of sentience and awareness that we have very little access to. Two, it shows (once again) that rats, an unfairly maligned creature, are capable of great care for others, as are many other social species.
“How do animals that help their brethren manage to prioritize those most in need? A new study shows that rats can use odor cues alone to determine how urgently to provide food assistance to other rats in need.”
A new study into separation anxiety in dogs has found several root causes of the disorder, including: “exit frustration,” “redirected reactive,” “reactive inhibited” and “boredom”.
Abstract -“Diagnoses are widely used in both human and veterinary medicine to describe the nature of a condition; by contrast, syndromes are collections of signs that consistently occur together to form a characteristic presentation. Treatment of syndromes, due to either their lack of a clear biological cause or multiple causes, necessarily remains non-specific. However, the discovery of interventions may help refine the definition of a syndrome into a diagnosis. Within the field of veterinary behavioral medicine, separation related problems (SRPs) provide a good example of a syndrome. We describe here a comprehensive process to develop a diagnostic framework (including quality control assessments), for disambiguating the signs of SRPs as an example of a heterogeneous behavioral syndrome in non-human animals requiring greater diagnostic and treatment precision. To do this we developed an online questionnaire (243 items) that covered the full spectrum of theoretical bases to the syndrome and undertook a large-scale survey of the presenting signs of dogs with one or more of the signs of SRPs (n = 2,757). Principal components analysis (n1 = 345), replicated in a second sample (n2 = 417; total n = 762), was used to define the structure of variation in behavioral presentation, while hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis cross checked with the partitioned around medoids method was used to determine sub-populations. A total of 54 signs were of value in defining a latent structure consisting of seven principal components (termed “exit frustration,” “social panic,” “elimination,” “redirected frustration,” “reactive communication,” “immediate frustration,” “noise sensitivity”), which divided the population in four clusters (termed “exit frustration,” “redirected reactive,” “reactive inhibited” and “boredom” related SRPs) with 11 sub-clusters (3, 3, 3, and 2, respectively). We used a bottom-up data-driven approach with numerous quality checks for the definition of robust clusters to provide a robust methodology for nosological studies in veterinary behavioral medicine, that can extend our understanding of the nature of problems beyond SRPs. This provides a solid foundation for future work examining aetiological, and differential treatment outcomes, that will allow both more effective treatment and prevention programmes, based on a fully appreciation of the nature of the problem of concern.”
An interesting article came out in Nature (abstract and link below) providing more evidence that neural links between the hippocampus and amygdala are necessary for associative fear learning. This evidence reinforces the idea that to reduce / undo fear association learning, we need to focus on amygdala activity reducing training techniques and environmental constructs, such as:
Training using positive reinforcement and pleasant stimuli, rather than aversives that may further activate the amygdala-hippocampus network.
Deconditioning fear through methods less likely to trigger fear/panic: such as systematic desensitisation, cognitive activation and counter conditioning.
Watching the animals body language to make sure you are not near the fear/panic threshold for the fear triggering stimuli while training so that the amgdala -hippocampal pathways are not activated and the associative memory strengthened.
Increase oxytocin through stable, social interactions allowing supportive attachments to form
Reduce overall environmental stress
“Abstract
In contextual fear conditioning, experimental subjects learn to associate a neutral context with an aversive stimulus and display fear responses to a context that predicts danger. Although the hippocampal–amygdala pathway has been implicated in the retrieval of contextual fear memory, the mechanism by which fear memory is encoded in this circuit has not been investigated. Here, we show that activity in the ventral CA1 (vCA1) hippocampal projections to the basal amygdala (BA), paired with aversive stimuli, contributes to encoding conditioned fear memory. Contextual fear conditioning induced selective strengthening of a subset of vCA1–BA synapses, which was prevented under anisomycin-induced retrograde amnesia. Moreover, a subpopulation of BA neurons receives stronger monosynaptic inputs from context-responding vCA1 neurons, whose activity was required for contextual fear learning and synaptic potentiation in the vCA1–BA pathway. Our study suggests that synaptic strengthening of vCA1 inputs conveying contextual information to a subset of BA neurons contributes to encoding adaptive fear memory for the threat-predictive context.”
The other day, I came across the below paper which is a very good summary of what we know about back pain in horses and the potential causes and symptoms (physical, emotional and behavioural). All too often behaviours which could be (or are) caused by pain are punished with very little thought given to potential physical causes and investigation. Even worse without the potential consideration of role of pain in behaviour, the horse doesn’t receive treatment and so continues to suffer. Ideally, as horse owners we should be educated in the basics of what to look out for and all back investigation and treatment would be done in collaboration with veterinary professionals. This is definitely a paper to read, may be on a raining evening over a cup of hot cocoa as it is a reasonable length. It is always good to remind ourselves of best practice around welfare!
Link to the full paper below the abstract
Detecting and Measuring Back Disorders in Nonverbal Individuals: The Example of Domestic Horses
Clémence Lesimple 1, 2,*, Carole Fureix 1 , Lydiane Aubé 1 , & Martine Hausberger 2 1Ethologie Animale et Humaine, Université de Rennes 2CNRS, Ethologie Animale et Humaine UMR Université de Rennes *Corresponding author
(Email: lesimple.c@gmail.com) Citation – Lesimple, C., Fureix, C., Aubé, L., & Hausberger, M. (2016). Detecting and measuring back disorders in nonverbal individuals: The example of domestic horses. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 3(3), 159–179. doi: 10.12966/abc.05.08.2016
Abstract – Back disorders are amongst the major health-related disorders associated to working conditions in our society. Horses share with humans the exposure to potential physically harmful working conditions leading to back disorders. However, despite their high prevalence, these problems are often unacknowledged in the horse industry, mostly because their diagnosis remains difficult, particularly in field conditions. In the present review, we review the current scientific knowledge on back vertebral, muscular and musculoskeletal disorders. We will first present the existing knowledge about their prevalence and the tools available for diagnosis. Then, the different potential sources of back pain, including anatomical implications, the effect of emotionality and working conditions will be discussed. We finally present the existing behavioral, postural and physiological indicators of back pain that could help an early detection of back disorders.
Keywords – Horse, Equine, Work, Illness, Back disorder assessment, Indicators
Science has confirmed that dogs can recognise facial expressions of emotion in situations devoid of other social cues to human emotion (e.g. body language and voice).
Despite having had a good amount of experience handling reptiles of various shapes and sizes, I have never owned one. That was before I rehomed Tali, a crested gecko of no known age or sex (though I suspect female). If you are unfamiliar with Crested Geckos they look a little like someone shrunk toothless from How to Train Your Dragon and tie dyed him with pretty patterns.
When I first got Tali she was quite flighty. Certainly she was not happy being picked up, although she settled once held for a while. However, I don’t like my animals to feel stressed at any point when interacting with me so I started trying to train her to be tame to handle and come out of her exo terra of her own desire. However, reptiles are rather different to train than mammals, so here are some tips on training your gecko for stress free handling.
Give them time – Lots of time! Seriously think of reptile training as an exercise in mediation. They only have little brains after all, you need to give them time to process what is happening and what decision they want to make. A week in your diary per session should do it.
Beware the Abyss Leap – Crested Geckos are an arboreal reptile (they like to live in forested areas). They particularly like to point this out by crashing about at bed time. Despite this love of leaping they are not particularly accurate leapers, nor do they care for accuracy. Look before you leap is not moto Cresties stick to, probably because they stick to anything. Anyway if you see your gecko hunch its back legs and star longingly into the air be careful to provide a landing surface. Should your gecko land awkwardly (which is a lot of the time) you get the fun of finding out that geckos have tiny adorable claws, which they prefer to use for hanging off your skin.
Positive reinforcement is difficult but not impossible – Unlike mammals and some other lizards, crested geckos are difficult to positively reinforce as they do not have a particularly voracious appetite and like most reptiles, though not all, are not a great fan of enthusiastic petting. However, you can make being out a pleasant experience. Make the room quiet and a good temperature, a too cold or too warm gecko is not a happy gecko. In the same vain make your hands a desirable temperature, if it is a hot day a little cool and vice versa. Making your hands a comfortable and safe place will go a long way to reinforcing the gecko allowing itself to be handled and being happy to be held.
Preferences and personality – Geckos do have preferences for handling style so stick to whatever your gecko prefers, Tali likes to hand walk and will happily explore in a safe area without trying to escape. She also has a preference for night time handling. Interestingly they also have personalities; some are braver than others, some more flighty, training needs to reflect this.
To train Tali to walk onto my hand at first I would just present my hand to her. To begin with she would only inspect the hand monster, mostly in the form of licking, this is where that patience comes in. Once she had finally discerned that it was definitely not edible or dangerous. Then she would maybe place a foot on the hand monster. Now after much gecko based meditation she is happy to walk onto my hand and for me to lift her. Starting small and building up has been the key.
The basic things that indicate that Tali is now comfortable being held are; one she initiates handling by climbing on my hand, two when scared she now hides in my hands if startled rather than trying to escape, three she is very relaxed when hand walking and four she comes to the glass if I am nearby and she wishes to have an adventure.
Often it is useful, potentially even necessary, to have more than one cue for a behaviour. For example, most horses need to know a voice and physical cue for the paces and to move back from a light touch to the chest and a voice command. Dogs will clue into the point and “off” signals that come soon after that pleasant, muddy romp on the two-legs furniture. Rats learn the screeching and frantic hand waving that prevents them chewing, or at least tries to. And cats train their two-leg servants to clean up after them through a combination of auditory retching cues and olfactory ones which trigger retching. Below my dog Jack performs the speak command to a voice and hand signals to demonstrate a behaviour which has been trained to multiple cues.
If you are training an animal, or are a particularly well-read cat training a human, it is useful to be able to teach more than one cue for a behaviour without confusing the trainee. There are several ways duel cuing or multi cuing can be achieved. You can:
Teach the cues separately
Duel cue
Add cues to an established behaviour
Teaching Two Cues Separately
Often people teach two or more cues for a behaviour separately. For example,when teaching a horse to trot whilst free schooling a visual cue or a voice signal is often used. However, during ridden work the horse will learn trot from a physical cue – a light touch with the rider’s legs. The desired end behaviour is always the same despite more than one type of cue. Separate, multiple cues can be taught to animals in this manner, the same way the horse is taught to trot from a voice command from the ground and a physical cue on board. Although, occasionally you may find that the cue-response establishment becomes dependent on the situation and that the cue may not transfer to other situations (a process know as generalisation). Lots of horse that free school very well will do the ear flick of confusion if verbally asked to trot whilst ridden. This can be overcome by introducing the cues in a range of environments so that they don’t become place or time specific.
Duel Cues
Most duel cues are taught almost accidentally by the cues appearing together during training. Animals, like humans, have implicit cognitive processes specifically designed to quickly identify patterns of events within environments, whether said patterns are circumstantial, correlatory or causal. The implicit mind is responsible for or has a hand in several human behaviours, including what we call ‘gut feeling’, stereotyping, superstitions and learning. For an animal, picking up on the pattern of the cues associated with the behaviour and reward will result in the animal registering both cues as being associated with reward when a certain behaviour is performed. Humans learn associations in much the same way, if you want someone to wash up more often, make sure something pleasant happens soon after and repeat until the washing up behaviour is established. The pleasant occurrence may include a beer or chocolate appearing in the hand of the trainee after the desired behaviour, or maybe just some affection if you are of a mind to be subtle in your human training, or of course, if you are a cat and limited in your reward options.
Back to non-human animal training. A common duel cue is the use of the word “off” and a physical pointing gesture to train an animal to move from an area. both cues are associated with the “off” behaviour being rewarded (assuming the correct training protocol is being used, even if the cream sofa now has muddy paw prints on it).
Duel cuing, thanks to the incredible quickness of animals ability to pick up patterns, is often a successful way to teach two cues for a behaviour. However, occasionally the animal can become stuck needing both cues to perform a behaviour or only learn one of the cues. To solve the animal needing both cues try fading one cue and making one more obvious whilst rewarding the response behaviour until the obvious cue alone will trigger the behaviour. Then reverse the process until both cues trigger the wanted behaviour. If your pet/trainee has only learnt one cue and not the other, the second cue can be taught separately or added as described below.
Adding Cues
As not all training can be planned in advance, sometimes extra cues need to be taught to the animal. It is possible to add additional cues to already established cue-response behaviour patterns. This is how we taught Jack to speak on command to both a voice signal and a hand one. When we first brought him home from the rescue all those years ago, I did a lot of training with him to help establish a relationship, to help him settle in and just for fun because he is a very smart and happy dog to work with. As part of our training Jack was taught to speak through association training, if he barked I said “speak” and rewarded verbally until me saying “speak” caused Jack to bark. There are other ways to teaching the “speak” command but this one is good fun and without pressure. If your dog is liable to be over enthusiastic with the barking you can also teach a silence command or train specifically for one bark.
Once the “speak” command was taught, I thought it would be fun to teach a hand movement to also cue a bark. I paired this cue with the voice command several times, rewarding the response, and then faded the voice command very gradually and emphasised the hand movement until both the hand movement alone and voice command alone would result in a bark from Jack. The same procedure can be employed to teach two cues for other behaviours.
*Note* Some people worry that teaching a bark command encourages off command barking, however, I have never found this to be the case unless the dog is confused about the cue. Certainly Jack is never a problem barker, although he will gently, but persistently, moan at you if you are writing a blog post at walk time.
I just found two really great reviews of my book on the American Amazon. They are quite old but I had somehow never seen them. A belated thank you to both reviewers, your comments are appreciated.
“5.0 out of 5 starsA Must Read For Every Horseman, Great Value, December 28, 2011
Knowing Your Horse: A Guide to Equine Learning, Training and Behaviour (Paperback)
My second favorite horsemanship book of all time. I’ve read many horsemanship books and this one beats all the others except for “Equitation Science” which I consider to be the very best. This book contains more important training knowledge than reading all of the books, watching all the dvds and attending all the clinics by Parelli, Clinton Anderson, Buck Brannaman, Gordon Wright, George Morris, Denny Emerson, John Lyons, Stacy Westfall, Cherry Hill and all the rest of that ilk. No ego tripping, bragging or marketing of “horse whispering” products either, just practical horsemanship solidly based upon the science of learning. Do yourself and especially your horses a big favor and study this book.”
“5.0 out of 5 starsBetter than Equitation Science, August 7, 2012
This review is from: Knowing Your Horse: A Guide to Equine Learning, Training and Behaviour (Paperback)
Knowing your horse outlines the fundamentals of learning theory as applied to horse training. This book provides correct definitions of learning theory and examples to help the reader grasp the concepts. There are training plans included to help people apply learning theory, as well as case studies and research reviews. Whilst I am also a huge fan of Equitation Science, Knowing Your Horse is much clearer and easier to read.”
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perature, a too cold or too warm gecko is not a happy gecko. In the same vain make your hands a desirable temperature, if it is a hot day a little cool and vice versa. Making your hands a comfortable and safe place will go a long way to reinforcing the gecko allowing itself to be handled and being happy to be held.
Emma Lethbridge Horsemanship 