Can children learn to identify dog aggression with age and experience?

Child interacting with a dog

Certainly! According to a recently published study conducted by researchers at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, both age and experience play a role in children’s ability to recognize dog emotions, particularly aggression. The study has been reported widely in the news media. Here are the key findings from the study: In summary, children can indeed learn to identify …

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Domestic cat maternal aggression

Domestic cat maternal aggression is instinctive

Domestic cat maternal aggression is also referred to as maternal protective aggression. It’s what you think it is: a queen’s protective behaviour towards perceived threats to her kittens. It’s a natural instinct when she is caring for her young. In Peter Neville’s book Do Cats Need Shrinks? a client of his, Susan Swift, asked …

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Cat redirected aggression or pain-induced aggression

Cat redirected aggression

Dr Fogle calls redirected aggression pain-induced aggression (it is also referred to as ‘transferred aggression’). I have not seen that alternative term before. It seems to me that the pain that is induced can be either physical or emotional. Although Fogle means that it is physical pain. He thinks that it might happen as …

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Judging a dog’s potential for aggression by their appearance is wrong

Some say pitbulls are sweet natured

In the UK certain dog breeds are automatically considered aggressive and dangerous under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991. This is a dangerous way to assess dog aggression as many individual dogs of these outlawed breeds are unaggressive. Battersea Dogs & Cats Home has been forced to euthanise 15 dogs this year because they were …

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A day in the life of a cat caregiver: transferred aggression-maggots-guard cat!

My cat Gabriel

This is one day in the life of my relationship with my cat companion. It might be fairly typical as all these things happen to every cat caregiver from time to time. Or perhaps they don’t and if not, I would like to hear from people. Transferred aggression I guess you know what transferred …

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11 types of domestic cat aggression and how to resolve them

This is an outline of 11 different types of domestic cat aggression that you might be confronted with and how to resolve them. They concern both aggression towards other cats and human caregivers. Intercat – territorial aggression – this commonly occurs when a new cat is introduced to a resident cat’s home. It is …

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Domestic cat attacks their own tail because of redirected aggression

Cat playing with tail

I’ve just bumped into another reason why a domestic cat might attack their own tail. We see a lot of this but it is normally in play. It’s just chasing their tail but if they end up biting their tail hard and even, God forbid, going further and biting off the tip of their …

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