That is just wrong. I had a Wolfhound/Shepard cross who was 175 lbs, and he loved to play with his friend Fabian the horse. Fabian who would only allow kids on his back ... well until my sister Kate showed up. She had horses and was a dressage champion.
She got on his back after talking to him, and he started to do his usual no adults thing, and she lent over and punched in the head. He changed completely and after a couple of moves, she said, this horse knows stuff. She had him doing all kinds of moves, sideways etc, that went on for about 10 minutes, then she got off. After she was gone, he went back to his old behaviour.
Any way my dog and he used to take turns chasing each other up and down the field. He threw divots when he turned hard ... and yes hung his tail out for balance. ;)
What the paper studied (via model) and actually claimed was that dogs don't use their tail for balance when jumping and airborne.
The received wisdom -- what one finds in all the "understand your pet" articles -- is that the use of the tail for balance in dogs is important when walking on narrow surfaces and while changing direction quickly in running. (and that dogs with tails removed in infancy can learn to be balanced regardless . . .)
I can see why the researchers studied tail use in this narrow subset of dog movement -- someone had already done model work that they could build upon.
I find it a bit bizarre that when there is conventional wisdom about when and why tails are important for balance, researchers would evaluate use of tail for balance in some completely different movement, and then declare as a blanket statement that their results apply to all types of movement.
The validity and generalizability of this result to non-jumping movement is not addressed and certainly not obvious.
2 comments:
That is just wrong. I had a Wolfhound/Shepard cross who was 175 lbs, and he loved to play with his friend Fabian the horse. Fabian who would only allow kids on his back ... well until my sister Kate showed up. She had horses and was a dressage champion.
She got on his back after talking to him, and he started to do his usual no adults thing, and she lent over and punched in the head. He changed completely and after a couple of moves, she said, this horse knows stuff. She had him doing all kinds of moves, sideways etc, that went on for about 10 minutes, then she got off. After she was gone, he went back to his old behaviour.
Any way my dog and he used to take turns chasing each other up and down the field. He threw divots when he turned hard ... and yes hung his tail out for balance. ;)
What the paper studied (via model) and actually claimed was that dogs don't use their tail for balance when jumping and airborne.
The received wisdom -- what one finds in all the "understand your pet" articles -- is that the use of the tail for balance in dogs is important when walking on narrow surfaces and while changing direction quickly in running. (and that dogs with tails removed in infancy can learn to be balanced regardless . . .)
I can see why the researchers studied tail use in this narrow subset of dog movement -- someone had already done model work that they could build upon.
I find it a bit bizarre that when there is conventional wisdom about when and why tails are important for balance, researchers would evaluate use of tail for balance in some completely different movement, and then declare as a blanket statement that their results apply to all types of movement.
The validity and generalizability of this result to non-jumping movement is not addressed and certainly not obvious.
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