there's our catastrophe

DOGS, cats, guinea pigs and even ferrets could become a more common sight on Melbourne’s trams, trains and buses.

Under changes to the Department of Transport’s ”assistance animal pass”, it will become far easier for people with conditions such as autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and psychiatric illnesses such as social anxiety to travel on public transport with their pets.

The assistance animal pass was introduced more than two years ago for people who wanted to travel with assistance animals that alleviate the effects of their disability. However, since then, just 15 people have been issued with the pass, which has been criticised for being too restrictive and even discriminatory.

The conditions of the previous pass stipulated that it could only be issued if the animal had been trained from an approved shortlist of accredited animal training organisations. Under the new pass, those strict requirements have been lifted, opening the way for hundreds of people who have had their assistance animals privately trained.

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Our aim was to evaluate how human beliefs affect working dog outcomes in an applied environment. We asked whether beliefs of scent detection dog handlers affect team performance and evaluated relative importance of human versus dog influences on handlers’ beliefs. Eighteen drug and/or explosive detection dog/handler teams each completed two sets of four brief search scenarios (conditions). Handlers were falsely told that two conditions contained a paper marking scent location (human influence). Two conditions contained decoy scents (food/toy) to encourage dog interest in a false location (dog influence). Conditions were (1) control; (2) paper marker; (3) decoy scent; and (4) paper marker at decoy scent. No conditions contained drug or explosive scent; any alerting response was incorrect. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used with search condition as the independent variable and number of alerts as the dependent variable. Additional nonparametric tests compared human and dog influence. There were 225 incorrect responses, with no differences in mean responses across conditions. Response patterns differed by condition. There were more correct (no alert responses) searches in conditions without markers. Within marked conditions, handlers reported that dogs alerted more at marked locations than other locations. Handlers’ beliefs that scent was present potentiated handler identification of detection dog alerts. Human more than dog influences affected alert locations. This confirms that handler beliefs affect outcomes of scent detection dog deployments.

this was in Animal Cognition, Volume 14, Number 3, 387-394.  you can download the full article for free here. 

tl; dr: sniffer dogs pick up on what humans think is important.  so all other things being equal, a dog sniffing out contraband is more likely to show interest in a person their handler already believes to be carrying it.  obviously this has huge ramifications in terms of the over-policing of certain communities, racial profiling, and so on. 

Typical baboon troops are intensely hierarchical and patriarchal, competitive to the point of Machiavellian deceit and violence.

But.

In this one troupe, the aggressive alpha males were killed by infectious disease, leaving more females than males and the males who were left were non-dominant.

Result? A total revolution in the culture of the troupe. Low aggression, high social affiliation. New adolescent males joining the troupe would bring their learned, typical baboon culture, but within about 6 months they would unlearn the “jerkiness” of typical baboon culture and learn this new kinder, gentler baboon culture.

…What this teaches us is that the overall culture of a group of these primates is NOT innate in any straightforward sense. They will not always, under all circumstances organize themselves in a particular way. Where there is competition, competition will grow. Where there is collaboration, competition will not be tolerated.

itsthefirstday:

TRIGGER WARNING: some explanation on tactics of police violence.

I believe in animal liberation¹. I believe that the systems of hierarchy currently in place maintain a stranglehold on the autonomy of not only all of the oppressed humans of our societies, but also the animals: the animals that…

super interesting and practical article on the use of animals (horses, dogs) by cops!

(via terrorbull-deactivated20110707)