Question: what science experiments are you working on now?

@marshy: Great fun chatting today – hope I get through the double eviction and we get to do it all again soon!

Right now I have a few projects underway…

1. Attitudes and perceptions
I’m writing up a scientific paper to be published that asked people a heap of questions about how they rate the welfare of different types of dogs (police dog vs. pet dog vs. guide dog vs. farm dog, etc.) and also how important they thought various part of care (access to exercise, access to fresh water, access to other dogs, etc.) were to dogs. I wanted to see if people who train and care for dogs in kennels had different ideas to the general public. Turns out there were bigger differences between the opinions of males and females which was interesting. And people definitely have varying opinions on the quality of life of different dog types.

2. Kennel enrichment
I’m also analysing the results and writing up my main PhD experiment which looked at the effect of an enrichment program on the welfare of young guide dogs in kennels. I compared their stress levels to performance in training assessment tasks to see if there was a relationship (for example, stressed out dogs don’t do well in training).

3. Meta-analysis
I’m working on a collaborative (group) project with a scientist in America. Together, we’re pooling the raw data from over 30 different studies that used salivary cortisol (a hormone in dog spit!) as a stress measure in dogs. By putting all the data from all the different studies together, we can look for bigger patterns and effects (such as ‘normal’ levels in dogs, effect of age of dog, breed, sampling effects, etc.). This will be really useful for people using this measure in the future.

🙂