On the 28th of September, the animal care world lost an icon; Dr Sophia Yin, renowned applied animal behaviourist and veterinarian, took her own life at just 48 years old. Her death is not only a devastating loss to the animal behaviour world, it is a harsh reminder of how vulnerable the veterinary community is to stress, and how pervasive mental health problems are in our society.
Sophia Yin's work modernised early research by Harvard psychologist Dr Fred Skinner who developed the concept of operant conditioning for animal learning in the late 1930s. Skinner's theories helped to highlight the importance of reward-based training and for the first time revealed how punishment was less effective than positive reinforcement in animal learning trials. Unfortunately, Skinner's work was quickly overshadowed in the late 1940s by a man named Rudolph Schenkel who presented his ideas about wolf pack behaviour, including the outdated notion of alpha wolf hierarchy. Schenkel's report was inherently flawed as his observations were based on a group of unrelated wolves in captivity that were forced to be together in an unnatural way revealing behaviours that were not an accurate representation of how wolves act in the wild. Nonetheless, Schenkel's alpha wolf idea caught on, and trainers of the day quickly extrapolated the ideas from wolves to dogs, despite the fact that wolves and dogs have very different social structures. Within a short time after Schenkel's publication, the vast majority of the dog training world was experimenting with using alpha dog principles to ‘control’ dog behaviour.
For the most part, Schenkel's ideas have dominated training pedagogy ever since he first published and more recent reinforcement by TV celebrity and ‘Dog Whisperer, Cesar Milan has given rise to a whole new generation of alpha dog devotees. In fact, in the 50 years since Skinner first published, positive reinforcement training methods have been in the minority, but it was Sophia Yin's passion and public persona that helped positive reinforcement to gain a foothold in the animal handling community. Dr Yin's credibility in the veterinary profession helped to cement reward-based training as a credible and effective option for not only canine behaviour, but also for training of all animal species, including wolves.
Dr Yin's most recent work, a practice certification programme based on her book Low Stress Handling, Restraint and Behavior Modification of Dogs and Cats is revolutionary in that provides veterinary professionals an arsenal of reward-based handling techniques, to replace force-based methods. I believe that this is one of the most important advances in veterinary medicine in the last 50 years. Becoming fluent in utilising operant conditioning and other reward-based training methods is important for all veterinary professionals. We all handle patients, every day, and the way that we handle them affects not only the patients' wellbeing and the clients' peace of mind, it also impacts our own stress levels.
Sophia Yin's death has highlighted her significant impact on the animal behaviour field and it challenges us all to make a difference by putting to rest outdated canine hierarchy theories and force-based handling methods. Dr Yin's death also sadly illustrates how suicide, depression, and mental health problems in our profession are all too common. So often after a suicide we hear comments about how mental health sufferers need to ask for help, but clearly this is a problem and if we can do one thing, it is to start talking about it regularly in our daily lives so that sufferers don't feel such a stigma in bringing it up. The more we make it normal to talk about mental health, the more easily it will happen. Perhaps we all need to reach out more, and talk to people who may be suffering with a mental illness. If we all do as Sophia did and believe that we can make a difference by speaking out, we just might. We hope you enjoy this issue.