Our challenge: to reduce stress in our patients and in our community

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in the late 1940s by a man named Rudolph Schenkel who presented his ideas about wolf pack behaviour, including the outdated notion of alpha wolf hierarchy.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.