The Pet Professional Guild Annual Summit

While dog bite prevention programs are necessary given the society we live in and how we share our lives with our beloved pets, we do need to ensure our educational programs do not become a stimulus for overreaching and alarmist reactions that negatively impact the lives of our dogs and the families whose homes they share.
This presentation will explore the goals of effective dog bite prevention programs and the complexities that professionals must overcome when implementing them so they reach their intended audiences. It will explore the benefits of safe dog-child interactions and the associated risks and how these risks can be ameliorated by teaching children and their parents how to “read dog.”
The session will also look at aggression from different perspectives and how these perspectives can be taken into consideration when developing and delivering educational programs to a wide array of audiences.

This session will focus primarily on the most common reason cats display aggression toward the people they live with to solicit play and attention.
The session will also discuss fear/defensive aggression. Finally, the session will touch briefly on the causes of redirected aggression directed at humans, and how to respond to it.

For decades, researchers have been producing papers that look at what can be loosely described as the epidemiology of dog bites through a variety of lenses. Generally, they conclude with well-intentioned recommendations on how to reduce the frequency of dogs bite to people. The studies
themselves, unfortunately, often conflate injurious and non-injurious incidents and pathologize aggression. The academic medical literature in particular is riddled with fear mongering, while the vast majority of dog bite injuries are at the Band-Aid level, while these in turn are dwarfed by the bites that do no physical harm at all. But these papers often lead to discrimination against specific groups of dogs and alarmist responses when a pet expresses any grouchiness.

If we want to continue pursuing this issue at all, it is time to reconsider which research questions might yield answers relevant to human welfare. This presentation will make the case for focusing on the bites that actually impact public safety, those that cause significant injury. A better understanding of how to reduce the incidence of human injury is unlikely to be achieved as
long as researchers continue to lump all dog bites into a single category regardless of severity.

Cats are commonly considered by some to be “aloof,” “standoffish,” or even “spiteful” because their behaviors seem mysterious and nonsensical. But cats and cat behavior are, in fact, none of these
things. To the untrained eye, cat communication signals can be obscure and, as a result, cat behavior is often misunderstood.
Unfortunately, this can lead to inaccurate assessments of cats’ intentions and a negative impact on the cat-human bond. But the great thing about feline communication is, once you learn to see the signals, you cannot not see them. And once you learn appropriate terminology, you will be able to
see beyond the labels and accurately describe cat behavior.

Do you do aggression consults? Do you want to? Do you think you’re not good enough – or experienced enough? Do you need more information about procedures and protocols for modifying aggressive behavior in dogs?

This session will discuss various canine aggressive behaviors and examine how to analyze, manage and modify those behaviors using a simple framework that includes operant and classical protocols, in order to help behavior professionals be better prepared to and more confident about working with aggression.