60 Your Dog May 2019ABOUT CAROLYN
Carolyn Menteith
DipCABT, KCAI, is
a dog trainer, writer,
and broadcaster.
She is a member of
INTO Dogs, the
Association of Pet Dog
Trainers (APDT), and
an accredited animal
behaviourist (ICAN).He wasn’t your average dog lover, but physiologist
Ivan Pavlov gave us a better understanding of our
dogs and their emotions , says Carolyn Menteith.
S
ometimes ground-breaking events
happen entirely by accident!
Several advances in dog training
have been made by people who weren’t
trainers or behaviourists at all, and
were actually researching something
totally dif erent — in particular Russian
physiologist and winner of the Nobel Prize
in Physiology in 1904, Ivan Pavlov.
Pavlov totally changed the way we train
dogs and how we view and understand
them; his inl uence is apparent every single
moment we spend with our dogs, whether
we know it or not.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in Ryazan
in Russia where his father was the village
priest. It was expected that the young
Pavlov would follow in his father’s footsteps
and he went i rst to the church school and
then the Ryazan theological seminary.
While studying to be a priest however,
Pavlov discovered the work of physiologist
Ivan Sechenov, and the radical (and often
imprisoned) writer and social critic Dmitry
Pisarev. Pavlov was so inspired by their
progressive ideas that he abandoned his
religious career totally, and decided to
devote his life to science. His father was
furious, but Pavlov couldn’t give a damn,
saying later that he never felt comfortable
with his parents — or indeed anyone else.
He wasn’t a people person!SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH
Pavlov entered the intellectual world of St
Petersburg at a time when Darwin’s theory
of evolution was sweeping Europe, and
science was beginning to matter in Russia in
a way it hadn’t before. With many Russians
considering that religion was something to
be left i rmly in the past, Pavlov said that,
for him, there was no religion except the
truth. He had found his true vocation in
research science, and in 1875 he completed
his course at the University of St Petersburg
with an outstanding record and the degreeImage: Bettmann, Getty Images.Pavlov’s gift
SIX PEOPLE WHO CHANGED THE DOG WORLD
of Candidate of Natural Sciences. This,
however, wasn’t enough, so the ambitious
Pavlov, with his passion for physiology,
went to the Academy of Medical Surgery to
take a course there, and later won
a fellowship, which meant he couldcontinue research work as he completed
his doctor’s thesis on the centrifugal nerves
of the heart. It was all still a very long way
from dog training and behaviour.
In 1890, Pavlov was invited to organise
and direct the department of physiologyIvan Pavlov aged 80.58-60 YD Pavlov CS(SW)ok.indd 60 25/03/2019 15:20