Dr. Ted Stankowich

Plus, my thought is that dogs are, they're artificially selected, and different breeds are selected to have what we call hypertrophied aspects of their attack sequence.

So some breeds just love to chase and grab and bite, and that's just what they're bred to do, because that's what we want them to do as part of whatever their job had been.

And they get so much pleasure

and internal hormonal rewards from doing that that no spike is ever going to overcome that initial drive to want to do that thing so i think that some dogs can learn better than others based on sort of what their background is but some just can't help themselves i think is the answer to that question so

The people who buy skunk chew toys for their dogs, I don't know why you would do that.

I see those in the stores and say, don't do that.

Why would you ever buy, you're training your dog to go after a skunk, you know?

Oh my God.

Or a hedgehog if you live in Europe or, you know.

So just be mindful of what toys you're giving your dog and how you're training them to chew.

When I first got here, one of my very first grad students, her name was Holly Schiefelbein, very, very first grad student, her project was going to be

We made some robotic skunk models.

You could drive these little animals around.

There was a spraying mechanism in them that could spray, not skunk spray, but citronella spray, which is aversive, just the same.

And the goal was to expose them to dogs and see how different breeds of dogs respond to skunks in different ways.

And no one would let us work with their dogs, especially the purebreds.

We wanted purebred dogs.

We wanted to look at breed differences.

And we couldn't find people who would let us use their dogs for it.

And we couldn't find a park that would allow us to do that project in it.