Editor’s note: This week we are thrilled to sit down with Lisa Dickel (whom you probably know as @calm.mindsandcanines on Instagram). Lisa tells us, “I am initially from Germany, but have been moving around for the past 10 years for various studies and research projects. I wanted to become a dog trainer after finishing school, but did not find any education I really liked, so I studied ecology instead. I have worked with a whole range of species, including plants, spiders, cattle, birds - and currently bees. I finally learned about dog behavior at the Nordic Education Centre for Ethical dog training some years ago, where I am currently teaching ecology, ethics and learning theory; and am running a journal club about dog behavior and welfare.” We hope that you enjoy our chat about animal welfare and how it relates to her research with dogs and bees, how her background as a scientist helps her with dog training, and much more! 

We heard you just finished your PhD defense - congrats! Can you tell us a bit about what you got your PhD in?

Thank you so much! My PhD was in evolutionary ecology - so evolution on small time scales and in relationship to ecological conditions. I followed the fate of birds on a tiny island in British Columbia, Canada, with different ancestors - some of them local, some of them immigrated, and found out how their survival and reproduction went. This gave some clues about what the underlying genetic effects of both inbreeding and outbreeding depression are. Also quite important and fascinating topics for dogs! 

We understand you are doing post-doc work in animal welfare science (COOL!). Can you tell us a bit about how you got interested in that topic? 

I think I was always interested in animal welfare- but it was only quite recently that I understood this was actually a scientific field, and: dogs brought me here! 3 years ago I started a journal club project (it's called the “Tiny science chat”) centered on dog behavior and welfare. In the journal club we read and discuss scientific articles together with other animal professionals biweekly. This led me to discover a lot of welfare literature and put me on my current path.

And because you are extra cool, we know you are also working on a proposal about dog welfare and ecology (“on the side” as you put it). What can you tell us about this? 

This is the eternal fate of working in research - I only just started my post-doc project, but I am already thinking about which research grants I want to apply for next. Even though I am working with bees at the moment, my post-doc project aligns well with my interests regarding dogs: The “degrees' ' of captivity they are kept in and how their welfare might be affected (both positively and negatively) through captivity. It's not so frequent that we look at captive animals through the lens of ecology - but it would be very interesting to see what we can find if we do! 

In your mind, what is animal welfare broadly speaking? 

Defining animal welfare is not an easy job! But I would say: the subjective emotional experience of an individual, which is impacted by a lot of different factors, including health, opportunity for species-specific behaviors, social relationships, and choice and control about all of these aspects to modify one's own welfare. What exactly good welfare looks like depends on who you are- which species, which individual, and in which state you are currently in. I am especially interested in positive animal welfare, a quite new development in welfare science - so going beyond just minimizing suffering. 

Can you tell us a bit more about “positive animal welfare” and what questions we might ask ourselves related to it when it comes to our dogs?

Positive animal welfare is a relatively new development in animal welfare focusing on positive experiences of animals - so going far beyond just trying to avoid or alleviating suffering and disease. An amazing refined definition of positive animal welfare is about to be published soon, which was developed within a European collaboration project (“COST LIFT: Lifting Farm Animal Lives - laying the foundations for positive animal welfare”). This new perspective also brings a lot more focus on choice, agency, and competence building of animals. 

The aim is to bring the individual animal and their experience in the center of attention, rather than viewing humans as the ones “doing things to animals”. We start to acknowledge that the same opportunity or situation might be totally different for different individuals. This is possible, because it has become much more feasible to measure emotional responses in many species rather than just expecting every individual of a population to have a similar interpretation. 

I think despite being so close to our dogs, there is still a lot to do in terms of understanding their expressions better - especially also positive emotional states and maybe most importantly the ones at low arousal levels. Unfortunately it's quite easy to “read” arousal, and quite difficult to read how positive or negative an emotional state is (the “valence”). For many dogs (depending where we look), the level of human control is really high, which brings a lot of potential welfare concerns. I think the expansion to positive welfare will highlight some of the challenges that dogs are exposed to through these high levels of control more clearly (and humans too really), and will hopefully offer some solutions as well - that might have the power to improve the shared welfare of human and canine animals?! 

You’re currently researching insect welfare with bees. We think this is so fascinating. How are y’all defining welfare with bees? 

I just started this project on bee welfare at the Swedish University of Agricultural sciences where I am part of a research group working mostly on bee health and diseases. Insect welfare as a field is just emerging and so far there is very little written about bee welfare - what it is, if we need to think about it, and how we could measure it. I am going to try to extend the current frameworks we use for measuring animal welfare in other animals (mostly mammals and birds) to bees and other insects. So far I am just getting to know my new study species and am finding out amazing things about them every day!

Why is it so important to think about the welfare of animals in captivity (like our dogs)? Are there any hallmarks of welfare you can share?

Generally we view captivity very differently for different animals. For 'wild' animals (and for our own species) we tend to view captivity as more problematic for their lives and welfare, while we view captivity as a natural and normal state for domestic animals.

But now we see that some aspects of captivity can also be really problematic for the welfare of  domesticated species, who have evolved to share, but not necessarily be captive in, a human niche. Yet, opinions that all domesticated animals require strict captivity for their own good are quite abundant. 

But slowly this picture is shifting: as we find out more about the importance of choice and agency in welfare science we see how important these are for animals, and this includes dogs and other domesticated species. It might be a frequent trap to assume we know domesticated animals so well, as they live alongside us, so we know what they want and what is good for them. But do we, really? 

Has thinking about bee welfare made you think a bit more about the welfare of the dogs that live with us? 

I wanted to answer similar questions for dogs as I do get to explore now for bees. I have been living with dogs since I was born and they have always been a part of my life. So when the opportunity came up to explore similar questions with a species I had absolutely no preconceptions about, I thought this was an amazing opportunity. I often ask people to try to learn about their dog as if they were an alien species which they had never seen before. This is a little bit what bees are for me now. I hope to take off yet another pair of “coloured glasses of bias” when exploring welfare, and then hopefully bring a more systematic and open mind to the dogs who I work with and study. Welfare is something very universal: What do you experience and what do you want, as an individual? It can be difficult for our human brain to ask that question again and again for every individual without making assumptions. 

Tell us a bit about your dog, Nyako. 

Nyako came to me when she was 7 years old while I was right in the middle of my dog behavior training. I was feeling like I could deal with quite a lot of things (probably right on top of the Dunning-Kruger curve!). Then, living together with Nyako was total chaos for quite a while and brought me on the roller-coaster ride that rapidly brought me far down from “I know what I am doing” to “I am really overwhelmed”. In the three years since then, Nyako has been a really important teacher for me. Especially, she taught me to let go of assumptions about dogs and to ask questions to her as an individual. She has put a few brightly colored sticky notes in my mind: That all behavior has function and reason; that pain is so incredibly important and can be very hard to detect. This was definitely no easy journey for both of us, and I am so grateful for the relationship we have today, and the generally positive welfare which we share in our little ecosystem. 

Since you have mentioned that you are now a dog trainer as well as a teacher teaching future dog trainers, how do you use your science background in this context? 

Becoming a dog trainer has made it much more obvious to me how much science is actually needed in practice. And it is the best both for my work as a scientist and as a dog trainer to move fluently between these two spheres. I really started to love science communication by bringing the scientific evidence into practical application, but also making scientific research more accessible to everyone. But equally practical work reveals scientific knowledge gaps all the time, and I have learned so much from all the discussions with non-academics about science! Further, I think in dog training, my science background really helps me when things do not work as expected. Then, I am familiar with the process of being confused, starting a broader literature search, asking people for guidance, wondering where my blind spot might be located (the “unknown unknowns”). Like that, it's possible to find out how I got to an incomplete answer, or whether I was possibly asking the wrong question, and to constantly broaden and shift my perspective as needed.