The idea is to refine the assessment and quantification of doggy behavioral traits. A professor at U Penn is conducting the research. What we puppy-raisers do is to fill out questionnaires when the pup is 6 months and one year old. I did it for Brando and Darby and, now, Dionne. It’s a little tedious — pages of questions and never any feedback about what the data is showing (unlike the Dognition project that we participated in last summer). But I comply, partly because I’m a reasonably dutiful puppy-raiser, and partly because I hope there’s a scientific pay-off for all of us answering all those pesky questions — somewhere down the road.
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| A sample of the CBARQ questions |
There was one small but immediate benefit of filling out the questionnaire this time: it made me reflect on how much Dionne has changed over the past few months. Her relentless quest for trouble has throttled back — dramatically. She still has her mischievous moments. She still springs up — as if jolted by an electrical current — to participate in anything that’s going on. But if nothing’s going on, this is her new calling in life:
