Category: Knowledge Transfer

Posts in this category are about the various science outreach activities and learning I participate in.

Value

Jilly5 Comments

I like when current events in the media combine to illustrate animal welfare in our society. This week’s blog post was impossible to resist.

Recently there was a bit of hubbub over a group of scientists discovering what they described as … a freaking puppy sized spider (emphasis mine, extra Raid cans also mine).

The scientists released a blog and the media picked it up and ran with it (because it was a freaking puppy sized spider. It wasn’t even chihuahua sized, this is a decent sized puppy we’re talking about. No I’m not linking to a picture. Google that yourself. Go on. Type ‘puppy sized spider’ in there. I dare you).

But here comes the twist in the tale (the puppy sized spider tail . . . wait, that doesn’t really work, does it?). Our intrepid scientist started to receive death threats and abused because he collected a specimen. And ‘collected’ in this sense means in the more Victorian sense. There is one less puppy sized spider in the world.

Piotr, for that is our scientist’s name, has written an excellent blog post describing the necessity of biological sampling, and the danger of assuming that any of us lead a guilt free life. I strongly encourage you to read it, but I’ll include this quote:

We kill thousands of organisms without realizing that we do it. Look into the light fixtures of your house or the grill of your car, they are full of dead insects and spiders. 

It is all but impossible to live a life that does not harm animals in some description, and for the most part (legally, and culturally) we often excuse ourselves by protect vertebrates. I’m really fascinated by the outrage that has come up around a spider.

This week, TV presenter Chris Packham penned an open letter to the presenters Ant and Dec asking them to put a stop to the ‘animal abuse’ in their show ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’. The show typically features ‘celebrities’ eating live bugs on screen as a challenge, or in one memorable case, a contestant caught, killed and ate a rat. Packham says:

“I can guarantee that some animals are harmed during production, because they are fragile or easily stressed. Or simply killed, as they are in your bushtucker trials.”

Are we heading toward a new age of invertebrate animal protection?

 

I have a visceral reaction to that spider. It makes me feel unwell. Yes, I am an arachnophobe (I’m not fond of any insect really), even the cute ones like the Peacock Spider are only tolerable when they are an image on a screen. When I see a spider the space between my shoulderblades begins to twitch and my heart begins to pump. Fear this, my body tells me, and even when I’m trying to be cool in front of other scientists, I cannot bring myself to approach. I have never held a tarantula, even though I’ve had copious opportunities to do so, because I simply would not be able to control my muscles long enough to do so.

It’s Okay To Be Smart did an interesting vid on this recently, but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to discuss whether we, as a society, think it’s acceptable to harm invertebrates.

I have beliefs about the way you should treat animals. This set of beliefs arises from my experiences, my knowledge, my culture and my society. This is my ethical viewpoint. You can explore the most common ethical viewpoints and how you stack up on the excellent Animal Ethics Dilemma website.

My ethical viewpoint has changed over the years, as has yours no doubt. Our ethics can even be formed by different thought processes. Some people will describe their ethics based on how things make them feel. As a utilitarian, I try to remove my feelings from the process of making an ethical judgement (interestingly, a small study of 38 students showed that the way they reacted to images of humans experiencing injustice and unfairness influenced the way their higher-order ‘computational nodes’ of the brain – in essence it was the logical parts of the brain that react in cases of injustice, Yoder & Decety (2014). It would be fascinating to repeat this with other age groups, and with animal scenarios too. The point being that your desire for social justice does not necessarily have to be based on the emotional centres of your brain). Regardless of how your ethical viewpoint was formed, you believe it to be right. When people act against their ethical values, they can be deeply distressed.

Now some people believe you should harm no animal at all. They believe that animals have an absolute value and that we have no right to use them. To live in such a way that upholds the absolute value of all animals is very difficult. The kingdom ‘Animalia’ (the simplest way to define animals, really) encompasses a huge range of beasts: do the sponge and the jellyfish have the same absolute value as the elephant and the tiger? Every time you swat a fly, uproot a worm, or even tell a dog not to eat the cat’s food you could be violating that absolute value.

This is a difficult (though not impossible, see Jainism) way to live. But most people begin to take a more centrist position by believing that animals have an intrinsic value. We must justify their use in some way. Some justifications are easier than others. I always find the fish eating vegetarian to be a fascinating example of this. Many species of fish (which is an arbitrary group of animals anyway) have very sophisticated nervous systems and are capable of pain and suffering. Killing them humanely is difficult and catching them humanely even more so. But for many people, their ethical viewpoint can accept the death of a fish, but abhors the death of a chicken. This often comes from a relational viewpoint, where animals are prized for the way we interact with them. Most people have fewer interactions with a fish than they do a chicken or a cow, and the life of a fish is more unimaginable.

And then on the other side, some people believe that animals have an extrinsic value, that we may use them as we wish.This is more common than you might think. The cat owner who takes his cat to the vets to be euthanased because he no longer wants it is assigning its life extrinsic value. When the owner no longer takes value from the animal, the life becomes disposable.

This scale of values exists in conjunction with the various ethical viewpoints we have. I myself am a utilitarian who believes animals have an intrinsic vale. I use animals. I am also rather broad in my description of animals. For example, I’ll eat any animal so long as I can be satisfied of two questions: “Did the animal have a good quality of life/human death?” and “Will eating this animal negatively impact my health or welfare?” Now that doesn’t mean I question every animal product that passes my lips, I am more than sure I have eaten poor welfare meat (as we discussed in our kosher post), but this ethical standpoint and my view of animals’ values guides my actions.

 

However there is an element of the ‘relational’ ethical viewpoint for me. I don’t have good relationships with invertebrates, and I don’t have the same emotional reaction to their injury that I do to a vertebrate’s injury. With that being said, we describe invertebrate harm as ‘cruel’ and ‘worrying’ in several cultural contexts. Imagine the cat playing with the spider, batting it from paw to paw, tearing it limb from limb. We frequently stop our cats from doing this, in part because we are disgusted, but in part because we recognise that must be an unpleasant experience for the spider. Cats are cruel and toy with their prey (probably because they don’t recognise their prey as sentient, but with cats you never know . . .)

And then there is the case of the little boy burning ants. It’s a short hand we use for unthinking cruelty in our media, or to indicate that a character will go on to become cruel. And yet invertebrate experimentation like this is a common experience for many of growing up.

 

What is the difference, ethically speaking, in killing a spider for entertainment (I’m a Celebrity) and killing a spider for science (the puppy sized specimen). In  both cases, a spider dies, surely the ethical line is one drawn in the sand?

Well, no, I don’t think so. It’s often tempting to write off ethics as nebulous and personal, but there are many, many reasons to support both the collection of the puppy sized spider and the banning of invertebrate eating on I’m a Celebrity…

  • The ‘greater good’ of media vs science. How much does the entertainment of seeing people eat spiders benefit society?  Not a huge amount, the trials could be replaced by something equally disgusting and memorable (smelly tofu springs to mind, indeed what one of the previous winners of I’m a Celebrity ate as a vegetarian). Indeed you could argue that the destruction of animals for entertainment is an overall negative for our society, as Packham outlines.
  • By contrast, the ‘greater good’ we get from understanding the physiology of the Goliath spider is a scientific contribution to  our understanding of the world. I prize knowledge over entertainment.
  • Which brings me on to volume – the number of spiders which die for this scientific need is less than the number which die or are fatally injured for this case of entertainment.
  • And this brings me to the method – the method of killing on I’m a Celebrity is one which we might reasonably consider to be a high-stress environment, even for what we know of spider perception. Whereas we  might expect the passionate scientist to have a calmer, more human approach.

At the end of the day, if you feel animals have an extrinsic value, neither of these spider deaths will upset you. If you feel they have absolute value, both these deaths will upset you.

But most of us lie in the middle zone, where intrinsic value must meet the benefit our society gets from either entertainment or knowledge. And it is here that the great ethical debates come in.

Regardless, threatening the scientist is not going to help anyone.

Cultural Biases: The Good Adopter

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Something that has come up in a few of our lectures and in one of our Google HangOuts from the MOOC has been the idea that some people who adopt animals from shelters are motivated by the need to adopt, or save, rather than to buy.

While there’s been plenty of research on why animals get relinquished to shelters, why adoptions fail, and how humans bond with pets, there hasn’t been a great deal looking at why some of us are strongly motivated to adopt an animal. I’ll put my cards on the table, I’m very strongly motivated to adopt an animal. In fact, I felt slightly guilty for adopting Athena, a kitten, as she was a very beautiful and desireable kitten who would undoubtedly have got a home without me. There was some part of me which felt like I should adopt the animal that was less likely to be adopted. (I tell that little part of me that even beautiful, clever, charismatic kittens like Athena can come to grief, and that with me she will have the best possible life I can give her or any animal. Also she’s mine now and you can’t have her back).

I wanted to think more deeply on this, what motivates us adopters? I started with my own thought processes, and this level of introspection may reveal a little too much about myself . . . For me there’s a pride to be found in not taking the easy route. I also have some misplaced reverse snobbery, where I view buying an animal as somehow bourgeois. This is undoubtedly to do with my own values, which are definitely to the left of centre. I believe in taking care of those less fortunate than yourself. This is what underpins my belief in animal welfare, ultimately, that I have a responsibility to those under my care. So is it any wonder that it comes across in my personal attitudes towards my companion animals?

This was a difficult subject to research and after some fruitless scholar searches, I changed tact. Forget animals. Why do some people adopt children?

Deiner et al (1998) looked at why some families choose to adopt special needs children. Interestingly 96% of their 56 families reported having a religious affiliation (this seems high to me, but I wonder if it is for American audiences?) 41% considered themselves to be active in their faith. The majority of the families who had adopted a special needs child (70%) had become aware of the child through fostering them or through the fostering system. Through making an emotional bond with the child, they had then made the decision to adopt. Interestingly, these families perceived themselves to be a closer, more cohesive unit than the average family. I found this particularly interesting as previous (unpublished) work of mine shows that successful animal adoptions often have the owner perceiving the adopted animals as ‘grateful’ and speak of the strong bond between them.

Of course, another reason that people adopt children is because of infertility (Hollingsworth, 2008), although this study also picked up on whether religion was perceived as important by the adopter encouraging the adopter to adopt. Religious conviction was also noted by Glidden (1984).

I’ve often joked that politics is a religion, and my beliefs about my moral conduct are a strong part of my own being, though I’m by no means religious. While I don’t ever see myself adopting a child, perhaps because as a biologist I have a strong desire to have a blood bond with my offspring, does my need to adopt animals come from my cultural upbringing?

While my (and by extension, other peoples’) motivations for adopting are interesting, when it comes to animal welfare we must ask: how does this affect the animal’s life?

Many people can have unreasonable expectations of their pets – I mentioned a few paragraphs up that some owners expect their pets to be grateful for their new home, to be able to compare their previous life with their current life and then understand their owner is the cause of that. Those are some mental leaps animals can’t make.

My unpublished pet obituary project, stuck languishing in the hell of ‘I did this too long ago and lost the original data’, was unique because it looked at successful human-animal bonds. We have lots of research on when human-animal bonds fail. For example, we know that lack of obedience classes, lack of veterinary care, lack of neutering, cheap purchase price and lack of knowledge surrounding care needs are all risk factors for giving up a dog (Patronek et al 1996a). We know there are similar risk factors for cats, but also the weird counter finding that cats adopted as strays/adopted with minimal planning are less likely to be given up (Patronek et al, 1996b). That last point makes you think about owner expectations, doesn’t it? But we don’t really know what makes a human-animal relationship likely to work.

Prior knowledge of how to look after animals certainly helps. Having the right animal for your lifestyle. Much as I love them, I wouldn’t work well with a border collie. From my unpublished work, the only thing I could really say that was indicative of the successful outcome of the bond was that the animal was readily spoken of as being part of the family, and assigned a familial role (for example, though I hate myself for it, I can’t help but call myself ‘mummy’ to Athena. The infantalisation/maternalisation of the human-animal bond in late twenties women is perhaps a subject for another day).

Marston & Bennett (2003) reviewed dog adoptions with a view of trying  to understand why some adoptions work. They bring up a point I’m very interested in, as a photographer, that we compose familiar animals in our shots in the same way we would a human, but not necessarily other animals. They also talk about the many positive aspects of owning a pet, which I’ve already spoken about, but they note that there is a huge need to characterise adopters in more detail. Kidd et al (1992) is one of the few papers looking at it and they conclude that realistic expectations are one of the best ways to have a successful relationship.

This phrase pops up again and again. But how realistic are the expectations of the chronic adopter? And the question nobody has really answered: how do these expectations really affect the animal?

Punishment is Dangerous

Jilly2 Comments

Last week I spoke about punishment as a training aid, and denounced the way some people say you should never punish when training.

But it’s very important to recognise that punishment is very dangerous and should be used sparingly.

I really wanted to put this in the last week’s post, but it was getting long enough. So I saved the rest in a draft which WordPress promptly went and lost. Harrumph. It’s difficult enough writing blog posts with Little Miss Princess Paws wanting constant dominion over my hands. (We are still at war over whether the laptop keyboard is a suitable place to sit).

I had written a post about dog aggression and how punishment can be dangerous when used to treat dog aggression, but now I’m faced afresh with a blank page, I think we’ll take a different tact.

Last week we talked about some of the punishments I’ve used for Athena, namely the chilli powder on the cables as positive punishment to stop her from chewing on the wires. I mentioned that the positive punishment wasn’t perceived as coming from me.

This is what I want to talk about today – the effect positive punishment has on the human-animal bond. Positive punishment is aversive, that is to say it presents the animal with a stimulus that it finds unpleasant. If the source of that stimulus is its owner, it can start to associate its owner with the unpleasant stimulus.

Inappropriate dog behaviours such as aggression to people, aggression to dogs, excessive fear and excessive excitement have been significantly associated with owners who use punishment to train their dogs (Hiby et al, 2004). Now this is a survey of owners and doesn’t distinguish between positive and negative punishment in its results. It is by no means saying that punishment causes these behavioural problems in dogs, but that owners who use mainly punishment to train their dogs report more behavioural problems. I find it particularly interesting that separation anxiety was linked with the frequency of punishment-based training methods.

Another survey of dog owners (Herron et al, 2009) asked the owners what kind of punishment they used when trying to modify the dog’s behaviour. The kinds of positive punishment used were:

  • Striking or kicking the dog
  • ‘Growl’ at the dog
  • Force the dog to release something from its mouth
  • The godawful ‘alpha roll’ (adjective mine)
  • Stare dog down
  • ‘Dominance down’
  • The ‘grab and shake’ dog.

Now depending on how you do it ‘growl’ at dog and ‘stare dog down’ are not much different than how I signal to an animal that I’m unhappy. Just like I would a child, when an animal is doing something I’m unhappy about my body language changes, I focus on them, and my expression becomes ‘arch’ or angry. This is simply human body language and works remarkably well with both pre-verbal children and animals. It’s held for a very short period and is followed by verbal cues that the individual’s in trouble if it’s not immediately heeded. (Though note it’s not immediately clear how these were defined in the survey or by the respondents).

Some of these other punishments, such as the ‘alpha roll’, have been taken down before. I was first introduced to this technique via the BBC show Dog Borstal and trainer Mic Martin. He used it sparingly, but I remember thinking at the time the show was quick to glamorise and sensationalise the technique. And I don’t think on this blog I need to go into the whole ‘dominance training techniques’ any more.

But the point is that at least 25% of the dogs which received these punishments then went on to show aggression to their owners.

Positive punishment, particularly those which involve you threatening an animal, or posing an animal a threat, present a challenge to the animal. It needs to have the cognitive ability to figure out how to remove that challenge. The idea behind positive punishment is that the challenge will be removed when you stop showing the behaviour you’re showing, but if you threaten too much, you may well provoke another behaviour in response. After all, what human relationship would remain cordial if you started to behave aggressively? After all, much of these positive punishment methods, particularly those detailed in Herron et al, are definitely aggressive.

Used inappropriately, punishment is ineffective, if not downright dangerous. The punishment should be something the animal can control (i.e. Athena can control whether or not to eat the chilli coated wire) and it should not make the animal face some kind of conflict.

In some ways this kind of punishment is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Most normal people don’t go straight to the ‘alpha roll’ for things like stealing a biscuit or chewing on the furniture. A simple ‘no’ or a diversion is usually used. But these more extreme punishments seem more suitable for more dangerous behaviour, things like aggression or serious destruction. But what is it that’s causing these behaviours? Aggression usually comes from an animal feeling challenged by its environment. Aggression is, after all, a tool used for the animal to get its way. Some animals go for that tool more often than others.

When you present this kind of animal with another challenge (from a place where it should feel safe and secure, no less), is it any wonder it uses its favourite tool to try and respond to that challenge?

So yes, positive punishment works when it’s used appropriately, but the inappropriate uses of positive punishment are rife. My handy guide for the non professional?

  • Make sure the animal has choice in experiencing the positive punishment.
  • Make sure the positive punishment isn’t exacerbating the problem (don’t fight aggression with aggression).
  • Never use positive punishment on its own.
  • Make sure that the positive punishment is IMMEDIATELY removed the moment the animal ceases the undesired behaviour.

Punishment can work, but only when used properly.

Punishment is Good

Jilly6 Comments

Before we start, I’d like to remind you that the opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues.

With that out of the way – I think punishment gets a bad rap. Wait, wait, it’s not what you think! We’re not going into that kind of territory on this blog . . .

 

 

Skinner, of Skinner-Box fame, has framed a lot of our thinking about how we train animals. Skinner used the term ‘operant conditioning’ because he believed that the internal motivations weren’t the only things that shaped behaviour – that we learned from our environment, specifically that our behaviours influence the environment and generate consequences, and that we learn from this.

Now, admittedly, Skinner gives internal motivations short thrift. It’s worth pointing out I’ve made a career of measuring the outcome of internal x external motivations and the influence this has on the probability of behaviour. Internal motivations are important, but that’s probably a post for another day. Let’s talk about Skinner and his box first.

A rat in a box. Two levers. One lever, when pressed, gives food. The other lever, when pressed, shocks the rat. Understandably, the rat learns to press lever one and avoid lever two. The environment ‘trains’ the animal to perform certain behaviours.

At this point I’m going to take a short diversion. One of the reasons I’m doing this blog post is to try and get my head around how to teach this in a more effective way, since it always causes student confusion.

Let’s forget about Skinner for a moment and just focus on two things.

The first is ‘reinforcement‘. Whenever you ‘reinforce’ a behaviour, you’re increasing the likelihood of the animal performing the behaviour again. The second is ‘punishment‘. Whenever you ‘punish’ a behaviour, you’re decreasing the likelihood of the animal performing the behaviour.

Going back to the rat in the box. It’s showing two behaviours: it’s pressing lever one a lot, so that behaviour must be being reinforced. It’s not pressing lever two at all, so that behaviour must be being punished.

The question now is how are these behaviours being either reinforced or punished?

We use the words positive and negative to talk about this, but not in a qualitative good/bad way. Instead I think students would find it easier to think of it as ‘additive’ and ‘subtractive’, the only problem with this being that then they wouldn’t be using the same terminology as the rest of the world.

For example:

Positive Reinforcement gives the animal something to encourage the animal to perform the behaviour again. For example, when a dog sits on command it receives a treat. The behaviour being reinforced is the ‘sit’, the treat is the positive addition.

Negative Reinforcement takes something away from the animal to encourage it to perform a behaviour again. The something that we subtract has to be unpleasant for the animal so that they are rewarded by its removal (hence encouraged to do the behaviour again). A common animal example of negative reinforcement is pushing a dog’s bottom to encourage it to sit. When the animal sits (the behaviour we want to reinforce), the aversive stimulus (pushing) is subtracted.

Positive Punishment gives the animal something to discourage the animal from performing the behaviour again. Similar to the above example, in order to discourage the animal the stimulus we are adding should be unpleasant. A common animal example would be jerking the leash of a dog that’s pulling. The pulling is the behaviour we want to punish (decrease), and the leash jerk is the aversive stimulus we add.

Negative Punishment takes away something from the animal to discourage the animal from performing the behaviour again. If you’ve been following along you’ve probably guessed we have to take away something that the animal would want or desire. A common animal example would be a dog that barks when it greets its owner. The owner ignores it (removes the desired attention) and the behaviour decreases.

To further confuse matters however, sometimes these are classed into ‘aversive training‘ which would include negative reinforcement and positive punishment (because the stimulus we talk about in both these cases are aversive, or unpleasant), and ‘reward-based training‘ which includes positive reinforcement and negative punishment (because the stimulus in both these cases is rewarding, or pleasant).

 

Where it gets really complicated, in my opinion, is where people start to believe that one type of conditioning, or one kind of training, is by far superior to the others. ‘Reward-based’ training is usually the one that most animal welfare people are keen on (for obvious reasons, I should hope!) They cite papers such as Herron et al (2008) which show that confrontational training in dogs increases aggression. This has resulted in something odd where trainers will start saying things like “aggression should never be punished”. In training terms, this means you would never reduce the incidence of aggression being shown!

Positive punishment is the ‘worst’ of the aversive training methods by this thinking – but let me give you an example I’ve been using with Athena. When she arrived she had a terrible habit of chewing electrical cables. It was very worrying. I would scold her with an unpleasant voice (positive punishment!) and I would distract her with toys, but still she would do it. I ended up slathering chilli powder and vaseline over the most attractive cables so when she would start to mouth at the cables, she would receive an immediate aversive stimuli. This is positive punishment, an aversive stimuli used to decrease the occurrence of an undesirable behaviour.

So there is definitely a place for positive punishment – where it’s applied correctly. The chilli powder example works because the aversive stimuli is encountered the moment the undesirable behaviour begins, and stopping the behaviour quickly stops the stimuli presenting itself.

I also use negative punishment with Athena. Sometimes when we’re playing she will want to bite and scratch my hand. When this happens I let my hand go limp and stop playing with her. No matter how hard she bites, I don’t resume play. Play in this case is the reward, and my attention/play is removed when she starts displaying the undesirable behaviour. With this one, something else happens too. When she calms down and behaves gently again, play resumes. The good behaviour is reinforced by adding the desired stimulus (my attention/play) when it is performed. The combination of negative punishment and positive reinforcement here means that even though she’s getting bigger, her playing remains gentle and fun for both of us.

It’s impossible for any animal (humans included) to learn without encountering all four of these aspects. Aversive training is by definition unpleasant, but it can be appropriate to use. Take my positive punishment example. The consequences of Athena continuing the cable chewing behaviour were dire. The aversive stimulus added was relatively mild (and came with warning – I think she only actually chewed a chilli cable once, for the most part the smell was enough to make her decide otherwise), and she had a huge amount of choice about the situation: there were plenty of other things to play with (and she would be rewarded for playing with those other things), the aversive stimulus was well defined (on the actual cable – no real way of accidentally getting the aversive stimulus). Importantly, the punishment wasn’t perceived as coming from me and so our bond and her trust in me was also protected. Finally I only needed to apply the paste once. Now that the behaviour has reduced, we can use an even milder positive punisher (me saying ‘no’ in a loud, stern voice), if she tries to attempt it again.

I am sure no trainer would ever say that the ‘no in a loud, firm voice’ is inhumane, but it is a positive punishment. To say all punishment is bad is to further confuse the operant conditioning theory.

 

Your final exam, therefore, is to tell me – in the case of the rat with the two levers, how was it being trained? 😉

Edited to add – make sure you read Kathy’s comment below, very insightful!

The New Term

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We’re halfway through Week Three of the new academic year.

Students, I love you. I really adore  you guys. I love helping you, I love seeing you puzzle out new ideas, I love when you challenge my thinking, I love when I can make you feel better about yourself.

But Jesus I wish you’d learn to read the course documents.

This year marks the sixth that I have been doing some form of university level teaching. In the past six years I’ve gone from the occasional lecture and lab to helping to coordinate an MSc program (admittedly that last bit has only been happening for two weeks, but it’s still pretty damned cool). I’ve come to the realisation that I really like the role of lecturer, particularly when I get to straddle the different scales from undergrad programs to masters and even helping out the odd PhD student. Which is a good thing because my wall planner looks like this now. Orange dots represent teaching days and I ran out of them so they start accounting for two towards the end of the year. Yellow stripes mean MOOC. Red stripes mean teaching at workshops:

The 2014 Wallplanner

But what really amazes me is that students, be they MOOC students, MSc students or just people who happen to catch me in the pub and receive a free lecture, never seem to read the course documents.

I’ve been writing some learning objectives for one of this year’s undergrad programs, and I was breaking the lecture up to indicate where the learning objective should have been achieved. I did this for a couple of reasons – I have a three hour lecture slot and that’s boring as hell. The learning objectives gave me a natural break. But I also did it because one of the questions I’m frequently asked is: “What should I know here?”

In some ways it makes me feel old. When I was at uni, we were only just developing this whole ‘communicating via email’ thing, and we received paper course books, which you had to look up to find a lecturer’s office. There was no way I was dragging myself into uni to ask them something I would more likely find myself in a book.

These days, however, I’m an email away from my students, and it’s easier for them to ask me where to find certain things. But it’s also easier for me to give them a reading list – I have lectures with lists of links to further reading if they want to, it really is information overload.

This is part of the learning process now, knowing what is valuable information and what is not. Part of that should be learning how to scan the course handbook, in my opinion, rather than outsourcing it to your lecturer’s knowledge, but that’s also part of the training. Students pick it up and within a few weeks it’ll all be sorted.

The thing is, I would never tell a student not to email me. I would really much rather say “As you’ll see in your handbook . . .” than have to say after an assessment “If you’d asked me I could have told you . . .” when a student’s done poorly.

Still, it’s student season right now. It’s the time when they’ll be grinding against one another in the cafeteria while you’re having a meeting with a guest. It’s the time when there will be emails at the weekend that expect to be answered. It’s the time where we gently remind them that Facebook is very nearly forever. It’s the time for tech problems, sudden financial difficulties, introductions and students second guessing themselves.

I love student season.

Who’s a Pretty Boy Then?

Jilly1 Comment

Working in the world of international animal welfare as I have been doing in the last couple of months, you are confronted by your own innate biases. These are little (or big!) ideas you have about animal welfare that influence the way you think about it and the choices you make for animal welfare.

These biases are often problematic as one of our main messages is “It is the animal’s point of view which matters”, and the animals don’t know about our biases. 

Now biases are hard to recognise because they are part of the way we think about the world. I’ll give you an example from my own background. I did a zoology degree which, in all honesty, was not big on the animal welfare side of things. ‘Naturalness’ was prized above all, because  we were conservationists and behavioural ecologists. I then went to work in wildlife rehabilitation with the RSPCA where we did our utmost to avoid interacting with the animals because if we were to accidentally tame one, it would not be appropriate to release that animal back into the wild. This meant that for orphaned wildlife such as foxes we went to great lengths to get them to behave naturally, with so-called ‘soft releases’ where they’re given a cage outside and then allowed out of the cage, getting maintenance feed for a period. This enables the orphans  to learn how to fend for themselves in a manner that attempts to mimic their wild counterparts. 

I then went to work in the world of agriculture, where animals are production units. While I worked in the field of welfare in both of these roles, it is frowned upon, culturally, to show affection to the animals. Most animals would be distressed by what we think of as human affection.

So I have developed an idea about most animals that aren’t dogs, cats and horses, that they really don’t particularly want or need human attention. 

But this isn’t necessarily 100% true. Many exotic animals in the pet or zoo trade, have been raised by humans. While not domesticated (genetically selected for traits that make them more suited for human-association), they have learned to cope with humans, and even desire human contact. It is a bias I have had to confront myself, seeing instances, particularly in primates, where human contact appears to be enriching.

The most difficult part about a bias is that seeing your bias contradicted feels wrong. On my holiday I visited a parrot sanctuary, which rescued former pet parrots. I noticed my bias creeping in as dozens of birds chirruped “Hello” and “I’m a pretty boy then” at me, beckoning to climb up on my shoulder and engage with me. One little cockatoo wanted very much to play with my hair, a parakeet was reciting its full repertoire of phrases  to my aunt while it sat on her shoulder in a  behaviour I could only describe as ‘desperate for attention’.

These birds are very intelligent and, at most, only one or two generations away from their wild ancestors. My training tells me they need all the complexity and diversity of a wild environment.

But behaviourally, I can see that many of those individual birds desperately wanted and craved human affection. They found it enriching and pleasurable, possibly only because their environment was not sufficiently complex without it, but could it be that some animals can simply enjoy the company of humans, much as we enjoy theirs?

This is a difficult question for me to parse, going against the grain so to speak. And yet if we ask the question “what does this animal perceive”, the right kind of human attention must be very positive for them.

You can’t shed a bias overnight, and my (many) cultural biases will remain with me, affecting the way I think about animal welfare. I’ll try and talk more about them in the blog, and hopefully by recognising our own biases, we can move past them to help the animals that need it. 

Bird sits on shoulder
Some animals crave human attention

World Animal Protection in Asia: Key Drivers

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image

Berocca and cake? I must be at a conference!

I’m honoured this week to have been invited to the annual key drivers in Animal Welfare for Asia conference, organised by World Animal Protection. (Formerly known as wspa). We’re half way through now and we have discussed the mooc, informal science education, animal welfare in Asia and much more. We’re also being very well fed by our generous and lovely host Ms lui.

I will post more about it later in the week, or possibly at the weekend but just thought I’d let you know that it’s all going very well. Really exciting stuff

Salvador Dumbo

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I’ve spoken before about how YouTube and the explosion of camera phones has given animal behaviour researchers a a way of quantifying behaviour that is rarely seen, or would once have been thought of as anecdotal. Well here’s a short example of (what looks to be) a very strange behaviour that is prolifegate on YouTube and the interwebs.

Animal art!

Hey, don’t leave. This is a science blog. Sit down and watch these videos of elephants painting with sticks.

 

In that second video, at around 09:20, I wonder if that’s a bit of stereotypic behaviour going on.

By my thinking, as animal behaviour and welfare scientists, we’re interested in two or three main questions here:

  1. Are these animals creating art?
  2. Does the animal know what it is depicting?
  3. Is the process rewarding for the animal?

 

Firstly, we’ll define ‘art’ in a somewhat simplistic manner for the sake of this blog post – it should be a piece designed to provoke feelings in the viewer. This would require the elephants to have a theory of mind and to understand that someone ‘other’ than them perceives things and feels emotions. This is a pretty complex concept to grasp. There’s some evidence (Edgar et al 2012) to suggest that some species are capable of empathy (or proto-empathy), i.e. understanding that another individual has an emotional response comparable to your own, and yet different from yours. Strictly speaking empathy doesn’t mean you understand you can influence the emotional state of others, just that you understand they have it.

So are the elephants trying to manipulate our emotional state through their actions? Probably not. Could the elephants be doing this because they get rewarded afterwards – most likely.

Now both these elephants paint what looks like another elephant. Do they know this is what they’re painting? Are they deliberately trying to paint themselves? (Or their mothers, sisters, etc.) Well there’s two aspects to this question – yes animals can recognise other members of their own species, but they don’t see in the same way we do. For example, you have to take very high definition photographs of a chicken before it will recognise it (D’Eath, 1998). In that case, unless something looks ‘realistic’ to a chicken, they don’t recognise it as a representation of their species.

You can train dogs and parrots to recognise that the phrase ‘blue’ refers to the colour ‘blue’ and various shapes (Pepperberg et al, 2000) but I question the difference between being able to identify the concepts and knowing the sound-object-colour associations. You could train an elephant to associate that particular shape with other elephants, but that doesn’t mean that it conceptually indicates elephants.

However, it is considerably simpler to imagine that these elephants have been taught to paint this shape (considering they all seem to paint the same thing), which is pretty cognitively impressive regardless.

Lastly – is it rewarding for the animal? I already pointed out what looks like a bit of a stereotypy and by all my interpretations above these are captive wild animals performing for their supper. From my point of view, I decry Blackfish for this exact thing. This is just marketed as earthy and vaguely ‘ethnic’, and not at all corporate like SeaWorld. Here we have a very intelligent animal being given a series of instructions that it has learned the appropriate responses to. I don’t see it as anything more.

 

However cats painting looks hilarious.

Statistics Continued

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Interestingly enough after last week’s post there is a brilliant article in the BBC magazine about doctors and their understanding of statistics.

Gerd Gigerenzer is one of those names in statistics I trust. His discussion of risk is fascinating. Take the example mentioned in the article:

As a doctor, you know the following facts to be true:

 

  1. The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% (“prevalence”)
  2. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% (“sensitivity”)
  3. If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% (“false alarm rate”)

 

 

When a 50 year old female patient, who has no other symptoms of breast cancer, has a routine mammogram, she tests positive. Alarmed, she asks you what her risk is? Which of the following is the best answer?

  • nine in 10
  • eight in 10
  • one in 10
  • one in 100

 

If, like me, you read this at lunch with a box of strawberries with one eye on your MOOC numbers, you probably said ‘nine in ten’. In fact the answer is ‘one in ten’. Why is this the case?

Well first remember that if there are a hundred random women in a room, the prevalence of the disease in the population suggests that one of them will have breast cancer. Second, remember that if we test the same hundred women, we will have nine women testing positive who don’t have the disease, and the woman who does have the disease has a 90% chance of testing positive (meaning that it’s possible she won’t test positive).

So with no other symptoms to go on, and remembering that it’s likely that 10 of our hundred random women would test positive (one because she does have cancer and the other nine because they get false positives), the best estimate of whether this patient has cancer is actually one in ten. She might be the true positive. But nine times out of ten she’s the false positive.

 

It’s an excellent teaching opportunity and the maths make sense when you think about it, but it’s keeping the populations separate in your head that makes it difficult.

In other news, I picked up Andy Field’s ‘Discovering Statistics Through R’ and I’m really enjoying it so far.