62 Your Dog May 2019“He gave us a way
to understand our
dogs better...”
reasons these behaviours happen is
because the conditioned stimulus produces
an emotion that drives the response. The
sight of your dog’s lead makes him happy,
as does the sight of his food bowl. They
are predictors of exciting events that your
dog loves. As such, Pavlov not only gave us
some cool research, he also gave us ways
to inl uence or change our dogs’ emotions,
and the knowledge to understand how
that works.
If you doubt this, use examples from your
own life (yes, you are classically conditioned
too!). If you assign a special ringtone to
someone you love and them alone, when
you hear it, it will make you happy. If
the slamming of the oi ce door reliably
predicts your boss arriving in a foul temper,
the noise of a slamming door will make you
feel anxious or worried.
Despite having transformed our
understanding of training and behaviour,
Pavlov was, by all accounts, not a nice
person. He was a volatile child, a dii cult
adolescent, and a frequently nasty adult!
All his laboratory staf knew to stay away
from him on his angry days (and there were
far more of them than non-angry days!). It
wasn’t only people he was unpleasant to
either. He looked on his laboratory dogs as
machines, and his treatment of them would
produce an outcry today.
An expert on canine salivation, he also
set up a gastric juice factory, as dog
drool became a popular treatment for
dyspepsia (indigestion) at the time, and
by 1904 his venture was selling ‘more
than three thousand l agons of gastricjuice annually’, which increased his
research budget by about 70 per cent.
Hungry anyone?PAVLOV’S LEGACY
It’s not even clear how nice he was to his
wife, Seraphima, who was said to have
miscarried their i rst child because she had
to run after her very fast walking husband.
Despite that, they went on to have three
sons: Vladimir, Victor, and Vsevlod, and
a daughter, Vera. Pavlov died in Leningrad
on February 27, 1936, aged 86 years,
leaving a rich scientii c legacy and a brilliant
group of pupils who would continue to
develop his ideas and spread them around
the world.
While Pavlov may well have been an
unpleasant character, we owe him
a huge debt of gratitude. He gave us
a way to understand our dogs better, and
his i ndings are something all dog owners
should know about. We must never forget
that our dogs are living, sentient creatures,
who live a rich emotional life and who
look to us every minute of every day. Every
single interaction we have with them is
teaching them something about us and
our relationship — and they are constantly
learning and making associations regarding
whether we are good to be around, willhandle them kindly, can be trusted, and are
consistent and so ‘safe’.
Pavlovian conditioning is happening
all the time and not just in the times we
set aside for training. We can be the best
trainers in the world but we mustn’t forget
that what we do the rest of the time is what
so often drives behaviours and emotions in
our dogs — and will form the foundations
in our relationships.
The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter
what we are doing, we should always be
thinking: ‘How is my dog feeling about this
and how can I make him feel better?’ In
that way, every single time we are with our
dogs, Pavlov is standing beside us.A statue of physiologist Ivan Pavlov in
Yalta, Crimea.Image: Bettmann, Getty Images.Image:Bettmann,Getty Images.One of Ivan Pavlov’s assistants i lls
bottles with sterilised gastric juice.58-60 YD Pavlov CS(SW)ok.indd 62 25/03/2019 15:21