
“It is pretty evident that under natural conditions the normal animal must respond not only to stimuli which themselves bring immediate wavers of sound, light and the like – which in themselves only signal the approach of these stimuli though it is not the sight and sound of the beast of prey which is in itself harmful to the smaller animal, but it’s teeth and claws.” “B” follows “A” In nature, an animal has to make connections or it can’t survive. The fact that you don’t offer training services doesn’t mean you don’t do training or sometimes need to do training to make your job easier and to retain clients. Knowing how dogs make connections is the foundation for all training. If you want a dog to listen and understand your instructions, there are rules that will give you more ‘bang for your buck’ when you tell a squirming dog to ‘settle down’. If a client connects those two things, they may figure out that for some reason, Buffy doesn’t like you – and take their business someplace else. For instance, if you have a dog that doesn’t like being bathed, it may eventually hate coming into your salon. The reason is that Pavlov wanted to know how animals make associations with seemingly unrelated events. You may ask why the first real scientific study of behavior was about dogs drooling. Most behavioral scientists only know rats and pigeons. You are about to learn more about this great scientist and you’ll understand the information because you know dogs. Within 20-50 pairings of bell followed by food, the dog would salivate to the sound of the bell exactly as it would to real food. He traced the physiological reflexes associated with food – salivation, reduction in heart rate, etc. At best, you may know that his most famous experiment was to ring a bell and then give a dog a piece of food. Pavlov is a name well known in the field of psychology but almost nothing about his work is known.
