Fellowship for dog scientist

Clare Browne with her dog Mica.

22 October 2013

Fellowship for dog scientist

Dog lover, canine researcher and Waikato University PhD student Clare Browne has been awarded one of this year’s Claude McCarthy Fellowship scholarships, enabling her to travel to the Canine Science Forum in the UK next year.

The $4,000 scholarship will cover Clare’s travel costs and registration, and she says she would definitely not have been able to go if not for the scholarship.

“There are no other conferences quite like this one in our part of the world, so to have the opportunity to travel to the UK to meet and network with other researchers in my field is invaluable,” says Browne.

Her PhD focuses on dog training– specifically the timing of giving rewards.

"Surprisingly, although there is quite a lot of research available on the timing of giving rewards and delayed reinforcement for rats, pigeons and other animals, no one has looked at this in dogs."

To investigate this, Browne filmed owners training their dogs at three local dog training clubs and measured the delays between dogs’ behaviours and rewards; these observations revealed that owners often do delay giving rewards to their dogs. She then tested the impact on this in some dog training experiments and found that even short delays of 1 second may affect how well some dogs learn new tasks.

Browne will be presenting some of her research at the forum, something from her next experiment which is currently being designed.

Alongside her PhD, Browne has teamed up with the Hamilton City Council Animal Education and Control and an associate of the Hamilton SPCA to offer dog behaviour and training seminars free to the public.

The Claude McCarthy Fellowship enables New Zealand graduates to undertake original work or research in literature, science or medicine. Many recipients use the fellowship to travel overseas to present their research or undertake further study.

ENDS

© Scoop Media