
The Pet Professional Guild Annual Summit
Crowne Plaza Portland-Downtown Convention Center
Portland, OR 97232
United States
Niki Tudge
Niki Tudge is the president and founder of The DogSmith, an international licensing company for pet trainers and pet care providers, and president and founder of the Pet Professional Guild, an industry association for science based humane pet professionals.
Paula Garber
Paula Garber is the owner of LIFELINE Cat Behavior Solutions in Westchester County, New York. She is a certified animal training and enrichment professional and certified feline training and behavior specialist through the Animal Behavior Institute.
Janis Bradley
Janis Bradley is the author of Dogs Bite, but balloons and slippers are more dangerous, the complete guide to research on dog bites, along with Dog Bites: Problems and Solutions for The Animals and Society Institute, and The Relevance of Breed in Selecting a Companion Dog for the National Canine
Beth Adelman
Beth Adelman MS is a Brooklyn, New York-based cat behavior consultant and publishing professional.
Pat Miller
Pat Miller is a CBCC-KA, CPDT-KA, past president of APDT and past board member of CCPDT.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.