Success In Placing Shelter Dogs Takes More Than Temperament Tests
Blogger Alva Noë talks with a dog trainer who says the need to give shelters, handlers and adopters the resources required to keep dogs and people supported and safe is critical in the process.
New evidence is calling into question the reliability of temperament tests widely used to help assess whether it's safe to send a dog home with an adoptive family, according to a fascinating and important article published last week in The New York Times.
A commonly used "food bowl" test — in which the tester removes a food bowl from a dog to test whether the animal shows extreme or dangerous levels of "resource guarding" behavior — has been shown, according to article, to be an unreliable predictor of how a dog is likely to behave in the home.
