Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Expert Witness for Canine Aggression Litigation

Expert Witness for Canine Aggression Litigation
By: Robert Forto, PhD

Attorneys may be uncertain about the benefits of retaining an expert in animal behavior in dog bites cases, or how such an expert can help. This is understandable: In Colorado, and in many other states, the law specifies strict liability for injuries caused by a dog bite. Thus, when only damages are contested, the animal behavior expert's role may be limited. However, if liability is contested, then having an animal behavior expert on your side may mean the difference between winning and losing.

Ten areas in which the opinions of an animal behavior expert can help the dog bite attorney:

1. Whether provocation was a factor in causing the dog to bite;
2. Breed identification and behavioral proclivities of different breeds;
3. The side effects of drugs and how they impact aggressive responding and the safety and reliability of dog training equipment;
4. The behavioral capabilities of the dog at the time the incident happened;
5. The dangerous or vicious nature of the dog in question;
6. The care and maintenance of a dog and how these factors influence behavior;
7. Was the incident foreseeable to the dog owner, or a landlord?
8. How alleged gross misconduct of an owner impacts a dog's behavior.
9. Identification of the dog which did the biting when multiple dogs are involved in an incident;
10. Reconstruct how the incident must have happened for the purposes of discounting or supporting testimony in the case.

Dr. Robert Forto is a qualified expert for both plaintiff and defense counsel in canine behavior, aggression, bites and other pet related attacks. Dr. Forto has over 19 years direct hands-on experience as a canine behaviorist and trainer, lecture, columnist and educator.

Dr. Forto has conducted numerous seminars on the evaluation, assessment and investigation of pet related injuries for attorneys, in-house training programs, home owners associations and city councils. Dr. Forto is available to lecture to consumer attorney organizations, insurance firms, trial lawyers and city governments, municipalities, shelter organizations, non-profits, among others. Dr. Forto has developed a course on the subject and his articles have been published in numerous publications nationally and internationally.

You can follow Dr. Forto on Twitter and Facebook and listen a weekly radio show, The Dog Doctor Radio Show and his subscribe to his forum.
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If you would like to have Dr. Forto speak with your group concerning pet related injuries or aggression please contact him though his website at http://www.denverdogworks.com

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Coaching for Peak Performance

Coaching for Peak Performance
By Robert Forto, PhD

If you are a small business owner and you want to have a leading edge in your industry consider coaching for peak performance. If you want any of the following give Dr. Robert Forto, a call at 303-522-1727 or contact him anytime through this website.

Would you like to:

Recruit the best
Make effective change
Achieve goals
Enhance performance
Enhance creativity and innovation
Motivate and energize people
Decrease response times
Keep your talented people
Communicate effectively
Improve teamwork

Dr. Robert Forto is a practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming, commonly called NLP and he can show you quick results in a minimal amount of time.

A common theme we always hear when consulting with a business or organization is that people are always trying to do more with less. Expectations of employees are rising, while resources are limited. The fight to stay competitive drives this need to innovate continually, to improve products, services and processes.

In some businesses or organizations this pressure leads to tightly managed. Process-led approaches that focus on minimizing errors and maintaining control. These management models have their roots in the days of heavy industry and manufacturing and the drive to control quality. Nowadays, however, these approaches tend to create workforces that lack motivation, intuitive and drive-and are often very stressed.

More and more forward thinking businesses and organizations realize that supporting and developing people is as important as getting the job done, and in fact the job can't get done unless people develop and grown their skills. These businesses and organizations are on the forefront of their industry and put in place performance reviews, feedback tools and training, and increasingly offer individual coaching between manager and employee on an ongoing basis.

Through a consultation with Dr. Robert Forto, you can discover how you can use NLP knowledge and techniques through individual coaching sessions to improve your employee's effectiveness.
The most progressive employers in the nation are using Dr. Forto and his techniques of NLP by integrating coaching into their every day company culture. Rather than formal training sessions where you may have to send one or two employees to an out of state conference, Dr. Forto's coaching program and techniques of NLP can create solutions to problems and attain goals very quickly.

Coaching can be a really worthwhile investment and does not always need to take a huge amount of time. In fact just after a few sessions you can use these techniques anywhere, anytime and in any type of business and as a result improve other peoples thinking and results.

So if you would like to find out more about Dr. Robert Forto's Coaching for Peak Performance program give him a call anytime at 303-752-2818 or contact him through this website.
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Dr. Robert Forto is a business coach, author, radio show host, professional musher, public speaker and canine behaviorist. Dr. Forto can be reached through his website at http://www.robertforto.com

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Pets as Therapists

Pets as Therapists

By Robert Forto, PhD

This is the first entry in a series of posts about dog law. The subject of dog law is often misunderstood and I hope by providing education to dog owners that it is not just he said, she said, in regards to the rights of our canine companions. The topic today is about canines assisting in therapy for a variety of individuals.

Four out of five people who responded to a recent Psychology Today survey said that when they were lonely, or upset that their pets were often their closest companions. One woman in a difficult family situation wrote that without her dog she “could not tolerate life.”

This finding explains why the most visible benefits of an animal’s companionship are reaped by people who lack normal human relationships: disturbed children, lonely older people, or prison inmates. Therapists and administrators now routinely use animals to treat or manage such patients.

For the most part animals entered into the world of psychology therapy serendipitously. One psychiatrist for example happens to have his dog in his office when a young patient came early for an appointment, then dog became an integral part of the child’s therapy. In the 1970’s an entire course of research was triggered when troubled adolescents in an Ohio State University hospital—many of whom refused to communicate with staff—asked if they could play with dogs used for behavior research, which they had heard barking in a nearby kennel. Even the most withdrawn patients improved after contact with the dogs. Dr. Forto helped develop a study for at risk youth with violent tendencies and paired them up with aggressive dogs for training. The idea behind the premise is to have to individuals with internal conflict learn to work together and to assist one another, cross species, I might add in a way that has never been explored before. The results were nothing short of remarkable. It gave the youth a productive use of their time and they gained valuable skills in caring for and training dogs, but it also gave these aggressive dogs a second chance.

It is not an exaggeration to say that pets can give people a reason to live. Often people institutionalized in prisons have no goals, no responsibilities, and no variety in their lives. Dogs as residents in these prisons make an atmosphere more homelike and can have a wonderful enlivening effect on morale.

A prisoner that is allowed to care for, or even train, a dog while his/her doing time may become more alert, involved and sociable to other inmates and staff. As one prison program director put it “the therapeutic results are nothing short of miraculous.” Dr. Forto was the training coordinator for a prison service dog-training program for a number of years and he can see the benefits of this type of situation. Not only did it change the lives of these prisoners, many of them doing life sentences, but it was their way of giving back to the community as they were a puppy raiser program with a national service dog organization. Their training of these dogs was very successful, much better than the national average and many of these dogs went on to be placed with families in need of a service dog.

Now that scientists in the medical and psychiatric communities have accepted what pet owners have always known—that animals make people feel better—they have set about documenting the psychological effects animals have on people. When people pet dogs, especially ones they have grown attached to, their blood pressure drops. The same thing happens when people talk to a dog—although talking to another person usually raises blood pressure. Even the presence of a dog is comforting. In one study, people who took a standardized anxiety-measuring test when the experimenter’s dog was in the room scored lower than those who took the test with only the human present.

Let’s let Freud, who was an avid dog lover, have the last word on the psychology of dog-people relationships. Here’s how he described the “extraordinary intensity” with which he loved his dog, Topsy: “affection without ambivalence, the simplicity free from almost unbearable conflicts or civilization, the beauty of existence complete in itself…that feeling of intimate affinity of an undisputed solidarity.” While yes, that may sound like psycho-mumbo-jumbo, it is clear what Dr. Freud is trying to say isn’t it?

If you are a therapist and would like to find out more about using a dog in your counseling practice or if you are a prison administrator and would like to explore the benefits of a canine training program at your facility please give us a call. We would be happy to discuss this with you.

Next article: Dogs in the Law

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Dr. Robert Forto is the training director of Denver Dog Works and The Ineka Project in Colorado. Dr. Forto is a certified canine behaviorist and develops training programs and consultations nationwide. Dr. Forto can be reached through his website at http://www.denverdogworks.com

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Socializing Sled Dogs to be Canine Good Citizens

Socializing Sled Dogs To Be Canine Good Citizens

Socialization is the key to making sled dogs safe for people and other dogs. This begins at puppyhood during a critical period of development between three and sixteen weeks. The sport of dog sledding is unique in the world of working dogs. These canine athletes are exposed to a plethora of experiences on the trail – other dogs, sights, sounds, environmental factors, and other circumstances. They encounter people at the start and the finish and along the trail. This could pose for a potential problem if these dogs are not properly socialized.

Sled dogs are raised in a group and are naturally socialized with each other and learn through interaction and what is considered acceptable socialization among dogs. Sled dogs will be expected to interact successfully with many other dogs during their lives, so it is imperative that they learn to behave in a group.

Sled dogs need to learn manners around people as well. Ideally this is done during the critical period of development, when all experiences are new to the puppy and a trainer can have maximum affect of a dog’s personality and temperament.

Dr. Robert Forto (2005) encourages trainers and sled dog enthusiasts to socialize their dogs. At a minimum these dogs should be socialized at least to the point of accepting handling from strangers and at a maximum, training the dogs to pass the Canine Good Citizen Test offered by the American Kennel Club. The purpose of the Canine Good Citizen testing program is to ensure that our favorite companion, the dog, can be a respectable member of the community on and off the trail. A Canine Good Citizen (CGC) dog has been trained to be well behaved in the home, in public places, and in the presence of other dogs.

Can sled dogs be over socialized? You will often hear that many mushers prefer their dogs slightly “wild” fearing that too much socialization could make the dogs “soft” or less willing to work in harness. But taken to that extreme, these dogs can be unruly and downright dangerous to other teams, mushers, and the public.

By contrast, four-time Iditarod Champion Martin Buser often lets his dogs run loose as they come out of the dog truck and they stay right with him until they are hooked up to the sled. Forto explored this in is doctoral dissertation: Chasing the Dream: A Study of Human-Canine Communication in the Sport of Dog Sledding (2005). He arrived at some interesting findings.

To some extent, the amount of socialization is a personal preference, but it is certainly time that sled dogs can be treated as companions and still be hard workers. As all mushers know, a dog’s life on the trail is relatively short. If these dogs could be socialized starting at puppy hood and carry on becoming CGC dogs’ it would be of tremendous benefit to both dogs and people.

Further research could be conducted on the feasibility for sled dogs to become CGC dogs’ and well-trained companions. This would save thousands of dogs from euthanasia, culling by the musher or worse.

Forto laments, “If I were buying a puppy for a pet, I would check its early environment and make sure it was not raised in a kennel with little to no human interaction, with only its mother and littermates for immediate company the first eight weeks of life.”

During this time of critical brain development, it implies so much more than simply animal-to-animal or animal-to-human socialization. What this means is that many an imperfect dog makes a very good sled dog if the owner/trainer has paid strict attention to the socialization during this period of the puppy’s life.

A musher needs to expose his young sled dog puppies to countless situations – crowds, flashbulbs, race chutes, loose dogs, other teams, wild animals, deep snow, running water, ice, streets, ramps, vehicles, small places, strange places – the list is obviously endless. Mushers should get their puppies used to their dog trucks. They should take them to town, and let strangers handle them. While it is true that puppies have a window of say three to sixteen weeks where the capacity to learn can occur, socialization can occur at any time as long as you are careful. The old cliché goes; You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can socialize them to new situations as long as the dog does not perceive it as a fearful situation.

Raising puppies and especially raising them for special jobs as adult dogs requires attention to detail. When people raise puppies as companions they often get them at about eight weeks old, take them home, feed and cuddle them, housebreak them, take them for walks, and play with them. What they are doing (and they are not usually aware of) is providing specialized socialization activities that shape the dog’s future behavior.

The layering and interacting of development and socialization events that produce an adult working dog are precisely unfathomable. This complexity of the developing dog’s behavior should remind the reader how passé the nature versus nurture controversy really is. Although, it was once a compelling question for behaviorists; scientists now understand why nature can not be separated from nurture. When we look at the critical period for social development, we realize that the genetic nature of the dog is shaped by the environment in which the dog is growing up.

To some people this critical socialization period and nature versus nurture and vise-versa sounds like magic. But actually, something permanent is in the dog’s brain that causes it to become genetically unalterable after the critical period is over. For some reason, what is learned is limited to this period. Once “learned” the behavior cannot easily or completely be unlearned. Given how much we as dog trainers, and mushers, know about teaching and learning, it would seem that we could teach the sled dog, and our companions, to behave differently, but the dog does not appear to learn it after the critical period of socialization is over. People do know this: You can’t teach a dog new tricks. But now do they know why?

Resources:

Forto, R. and Bowersox, R., Canine Sciences Level I, course material. ed. 2004.
Forto, R., CHASING THE DREAM: A Study of Human-Canine Communication in the
Sport of Dog Sledding. Doctorate, Human-Canine Communication,
Madison University.

Volhard, J., and W., The Canine Good Citizen: Every Dog Can Be One. New York, NY:
Howell Book House, 1994.

Forsberg, W., “Training Good Citizens,” Mushing Magazine. March/April 1996.
pp. 12-13, & 18.

Coppinger, R., and L., DOGS: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and
Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
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Robert Forto, Ph.D. (Human-Canine Communication) is a graduate of Canine Communication Studies and is a musher. His research interests include: canine evolution, sled dog history, the Siberian Evaluation for Performance Program and Mushing in the Olympic Games. He can be contacted through his website at http://www.denverdogworks.com