I have been an “animal lover” as long as I can remember. My mother volunteers for an animal shelter, and growing up, we were frequently bottle feeding kittens and ferrying all sorts of injured critters to appropriate specialists. I still love cats. I have one that sleeps on me every night. As much as I enjoy cuddling with my cats, I have never had as strong of an emotional connection with them as I have with my dogs. Have you ever felt that dogs are just special when it comes to animals? Some research suggests “…that in many ways dogs are more human-like than any other species, including non-human primates.” (Udell & Wynne, 2008, p. 247). Udell & Wynne argue during the tens of thousands of years of co-evolution with humans, dogs became sensitive
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As an adult, my first dog was a boxer-mix named Penny. My husband and I rescued Penny from an animal shelter when she was 18-months old. Penny had her quirks (like a penchant for playing seek and destroy with dirty diapers), but she was a devoted and extraordinarily obedient dog. When she was 8-years-old, she was diagnosed with lymphoma. We opted to treat Penny with chemotherapy. Before we began treating Penny with chemotherapy, she loved going for car rides and didn’t mind going to the vet. In fact, she wouldn’t leave the vet’s office until she got her treats. When we first started treatments, Penny would shiver when her blood was drawn or an IV was placed. After the first several treatments, Penny began to shiver while waiting to be taken back for her IV treatment. Eventually, Penny even stopped wanting to go for car rides and she would shake all the way to the vet. This is an example of classical conditioning. My dog originally felt comfortable enough in the vet’s waiting room (the conditioned stimulus) to focus more on the other people and dogs. She had never before shivered with fear or anxiety while waiting to be seen. Because she began to associate the setting of the vet’s office with something she feared (the pain of the injection), she began to have the same physiological response to both. Just as Pavlov’s dogs eventually drooled to the sound of the researcher’s footsteps (Gerrig, 2013), Penny would eventually shiver on the ride to the vet’s
As an adult, my first dog was a boxer-mix named Penny. My husband and I rescued Penny from an animal shelter when she was 18-months old. Penny had her quirks (like a penchant for playing seek and destroy with dirty diapers), but she was a devoted and extraordinarily obedient dog. When she was 8-years-old, she was diagnosed with lymphoma. We opted to treat Penny with chemotherapy. Before we began treating Penny with chemotherapy, she loved going for car rides and didn’t mind going to the vet. In fact, she wouldn’t leave the vet’s office until she got her treats. When we first started treatments, Penny would shiver when her blood was drawn or an IV was placed. After the first several treatments, Penny began to shiver while waiting to be taken back for her IV treatment. Eventually, Penny even stopped wanting to go for car rides and she would shake all the way to the vet. This is an example of classical conditioning. My dog originally felt comfortable enough in the vet’s waiting room (the conditioned stimulus) to focus more on the other people and dogs. She had never before shivered with fear or anxiety while waiting to be seen. Because she began to associate the setting of the vet’s office with something she feared (the pain of the injection), she began to have the same physiological response to both. Just as Pavlov’s dogs eventually drooled to the sound of the researcher’s footsteps (Gerrig, 2013), Penny would eventually shiver on the ride to the vet’s