Lithuania Lecture - Introduction to Animal Assisted Therapy and Ethology

I have recently been invited to Vilnius, Lithuania to talk about AAT and related topics. The entire event was hosted by the Austrian Embassy in Vilnius. The presentation was great, we had a great audience who asked a lot of interesting questions. What I really enjoyed about this is that this event brought together animal lovers from all over Lithuania, dog owners, trainers, breeders and people just interested in AAT. I got a lot of positive feedback and one of the reasons why I'm writing this is that I found that people are actually reading this blog.:D So, for those of you who attended this lecture, I just wanted to say thank you ! Also a big thanks goes to Vier Pfoten for making this possible and Ms. Gudrun Koller and the Austrian Embassy for their involvement and hospitality. It was a great experience that I hope to repeat soon ! Thank you ! Victor

The Effects of Animal Assisted Therapy on Communication and Social Skills: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis was published in the Transylvanian Journal of Psychology as part of my doctoral research, and it's just been indexed by Ebsco :)

My Dropbox Anthrozoology Library

This is my Dropbox Anthrozoology Library. I thought I'd share all these materials with you. You will find great books and research articles. The folder is constantly updated, so check back :)

School of Advanced Studies: Human-Animal Interaction 2012

Between the 20th and 25th of November in Cluj Napoca, Romania took place a series of lectures and events organized under the name of School of Advanced Studies: Human Animal Interaction. Among the lectures on Behavioral Enrichment, Animal Training, Animal Keeping and numerous others by distinguished speakers, the event also marked the official launch of the Human Animal Interaction Research Institute (ICIOA). You can visit the institute's site here.

Also, you can visit my Youtube channel for HD recordings of some of the lectures.

Useful Free Software for Ethology, Behavior Analysis and Conservation

This is just a list of software that I played with or just found interesting. I will come back with more detailed descriptions.


Agna - Social Network Analysis
SocNetV - Social Network Analysis
jWatcher - Behavioral Analysis
CowLog - Behavioral Analysis (not as complex as JWatcher)
EthoLog - Behavioral Analysis
Distance - Distance sampling surveys of wildlife populations
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847204/
Vortex - Population Viability Analysis
ArcGIS - online mapping application
Maxent - species habitat modeling
Garp - predict and analyze wild species distributions
JAABA - The Janelia Automatic Animal Behavior Annotator (JAABA) is a machine learning-based system that enables researchers to automatically compute interpretable, quantitative statistics describing video of behaving animals.

The 12th IAHAIO International Conference in Stockholm

I have just returned from this conference in Stockholm. For those of you who are wondering what the hell IAHAIO means, here it is: IAHAIO is an acronym for the International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations. It is an international umbrella organization for all organizations within its field.
The conference lasted for four days, and was filled with some very interesting presentations on all areas involving human-animal interaction. My presentation was on the work I do with the VIER PFOTEN Foundation in Bucharest on animal assisted therapy for children with disabilities.
This conference brought together people from all areas involved in human animal interactions: medical doctors, psychologists, ethologists and dog trainers. The only problem is that all these people do not speak the same language (we got along just fine in English, but that's not what I want to talk about). Researchers came to share studies, recent research and scientific information. Dog trainers came to talk about their practice with dogs. Some of the more scientific presentations were I think too scientific for the dog people, and some of the dog trainers presentations seemed to lack scientific support to the scientists.
In the end, there was something in it for everybody. Everybody got what they came there for. But still the gap remains between the practitioner and the scientist doing the research. And still the practitioners accuse scientists that they lack hands on experience, and the scientists accuse the practitioners of lack of scientific rigor. 
The way I see it there is only two ways out of this:
1. to promote the scientist-practitioner paradigm, meaning that the scientists should get out of the lab and get their hands dirty
2. to create mixed research teams in which practitioners should be included
There is a lot of valuable information and knowledge out there with the practitioners, that doesn't push science further just because the practitioners don't write it down, structure it and publish it. Opinions, and ideas should be encouraged more in practitioners. Research should be based more on solving the problems they face every day in practice.  
Human Animal Interaction is a new field. It's normal that the beginning should be like this. Events such as this conference bring together people from different disciplines to share knowledge. And it's great this is happening. But in the end, it all comes down to money again. How many good people interested in this field can afford the trip to Stockholm for the sake of knowledge ? Even more, 3 years from now, in 2013, when the conference will be held in Denver, how many Europeans will afford the trip to Colorado ?
Not many from Romania, I can tell you that.
What's sad is that we have a lot to offer in this field in terms of research material. We have great wildlife, and a consistent population of stray dogs. The number of research topics that can be explored extensively on stray dogs alone is tremendous. 
These are some of the thoughts I brought with me from this trip. This, a lot of contacts of wonderful people I met, a lot of ideas to work on, and the image of beautiful Stockholm.