Some Current Plans

In this blog we wanted to share our latest and most up to date research plans. Our team here at the British Institute of Canine Science are always having new ideas on things that we want to investigate so this is not a 'set in stone' list of upcoming projects, but more a mind dump on some of the things we want to research, the reasons why and why we believe they are important to the real world of dog ownership and training.

Thankfully as an independant research team we are not constrained by institutional restraint or industry politics which leaves us free to investigate the topics we think are the most exciting or interesting. We will be releasing our first official piece of research very soon and you can receive the full update to that by becoming a Silver Member or a Gold member of BICS.

If you want to join and support our ongoing endeavors please visit the Join page here on the website > https://www.britishinstituteofcaninescience.org/get-involved

We have an endless list of research projects that we would love to undertake, more than we will ever have time in this life to pursue, but let's take a brief look at some that our currently exciting our team, and stay tuned for our first official announcement that will be coming this week. (If you are reading this blog sometime in the future, it may already be there!) Let's dive into a quick overview of three of the many pieces of research we want to conduct, in three different areas of canine study.

One of the pieces of research we wish to conduct is a review paper. Taking a large collection of other studies discussing different training methods and creating an overview of them. Looking at the data collection methods, data analysis methods, outcomes and consistency. We want to perform this research to try and establish a baseline for the current state of canine research and science and think it would be very interesting to have some hard statistics regarding this research because in many studies, no dogs are even observed and owner questionnaire is the method of data collection which we believe to be a very weak and inconsistent method of data collection due to the endless variables at play regarding owners views, knowledge and opinion.

Another piece of research we are excited to conduct is an applied piece of research, extremely relevent and useful to the normal dog owner. We want to look into a few methods of increasing canine attention toward owners. Our brief pencil plan is to take a group of dogs, ourselves and measure the amount of owner interaction from the dogs. We will then give one group a simple and easy to achieve engagement principle for a given time, a second group a second method and a third group a third method. Once this time is elapsed (A week, a month, three months etc), we will bring the dogs back to the institute and measure again how frequently dogs are choosing to interact with their owners. This is an absolutely vital real life study to ascertain which simple method is the most 'bang for buck' for owners to utilise into their normal life. Having a dog in tune with its handler makes all training easier, and life more simple and straight forward.

A third piece of research we wish to conduct is a complete canine behavioural ethogram. An ethogram is officially defined as 'a catalogue or table of all the different kinds of behaviour or activity observed in an animal.' We have very complete ethograms for other species of animal, such as elephants and mice, but canine ethograms are largely incomplete and difficult to read. We are hoping to change this to create a given behavioural ethogram that can be referred to in future studies around the world. Many ethograms are written word only which can make them hard to follow and reference. We are hoping to have the aid of video and picture in our ethogram focusing only on 'behavioural' aspects of canine behaviour. This means we will not be focusing on behaviours like mating or eating but looking more into stress and relaxation, aggression and possession.

This is just three of the many studies we are hoping to conduct and although our team is very small, we are very committed, working full time on this project to ensure that robust and accurate canine studies can be conducted. We are also in the process of approaching other professionals in the canine field to assist us in some of our studies and expand our research into more niche and specialist areas.

We are all very excited for the future and feeling extremely positive about producing brilliant research to help everyone live a more harmonious life with their four legged friend. We rely solely on your memberships to keep this research project alive so we would endlessly appreciate if you would consider becoming a member of BICS and we will continuously do our best to make it worth your while. Become a member - https://www.britishinstituteofcaninescience.org/get-involved

Stay tuned for our official release of our first piece of research coming very soon!

The Team

British Institute of Canine Science