Dr. Foote is the owner and head veterinarian at Okaw Veterinary Clinic, in Tuscola, IL.  Since 1984, Dr. Foote has maintained earning a minimum of 20 continuing education credit hours per year in veterinary medicine with a focus on small animal medicine and behavior.  She is a Certified Animal Behavior Consultant with the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants with a Feline specialty. She was the past president of Eastern Illinois Veterinary Medical Association 1991; a member of the Speaker Bureau of American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior; the secretary/treasurer of the Illinois Veterinary Medical Foundation 2006 to present; and, the student liaison for the student chapters of the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior, 2010 to present.

Dr. Foote is a published author and a well-regarded professional speaker on animal behavior, with a focus on positive handling techniques for dogs and cats. Dr. Foote’s programs offer exceptional educational value. Validated by RACE through the American Association of Veterinary State Boards, many of her programs meet the strict criteria recognized and accepted by the profession, the science and discipline of veterinary medicine. In addition, she has 25-plus years of experience dedicated to reducing stress in patient care.

Recorded OnDemand Lecture:  Dealing with Cabin Fever in Pets

Heather Frigiola is an independent cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the role of animals within human culture.  Her talk, “Dogs and Dog People vs. Cats and Cat People,” is a continuation of her Master’s thesis research from Purdue University.  She believes that it is essential for all persons working with animals to be mindful of the relevant cultural and historical context of interspecies relationships, and its social implications.  As a graduate student, Heather studied under Alan Beck, who is one of the founding fathers of Human-Animal Studies, or Anthrozoology.  She hopes to encourage other cultural anthropologists to contribute to this field.

Heather worked at Purdue University as a lecturer for an Honors course titled “The Roles of Animals in Societies Around the World,” later renamed “Animals in Global Cultures.”  She was sought by a senior faculty member at Purdue’s Animal Sciences department to lend her anthropological knowledge to the class, which is aimed at teaching multicultural awareness to Animal Sciences students.  She contributed to the curriculum design of the course in addition to providing lectures and reading materials.  Heather has also given formal presentations on various topics such as domestication theory, feline behavior, the anthropomorphization of animals, and the relationship between pet-keeping and personal identity.

Passionate about both education and animals, Heather has volunteered as a tour guide at Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana.  She also spent many years volunteering at a nature center in Northern Virginia.  Her profile photo shows Hunter the gray fox at Wolf Park.  Heather’s thesis and some of her other writings can be downloaded for free at the HABRI Central Library, https://habricentral.org/members/1287/contributions

Webinar: Dogs and Dog People vs. Cats and Cat People: Identity and Pet Culture

Kazuo FUJITA, D.Sci., is a professor of psychology at the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University. He was trained as a comparative psychologist at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, in the graduate school. After obtaining his doctoral degree in 1982, he served as a researcher, assistant professor, and associate professor at the same institute. He moved to the main campus in 1996, where he has lead the comparative cognition laboratory for 16 years. He is much interested in the diversity of cognition in the animal kingdom and has tested various animals such as rodents, avians, nonhuman primates, dogs, and horses using both ethological and psychological methods, in collaboration with his postdocs and graduate students. For more details, visit https://www.psy.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/fujita/ (Japanese only).

Recorded OnDemand Lecture: Dog Cognition: A Report from Kyoto

Simon Gadbois integrates ethology, animal experimental psychology, and behavioural neuroscience to study wild and domestic canids. He completed his Ph.D. in behavioural endocrinology at the Canadian Centre for Wolf Research (CCWR) examining the hormonal correlates of social behaviour in wolves, as well as action sequences in wolves, coyotes and red foxes. When the CCWR closed in 2007, he started the Canid Behaviour Research Lab at Dalhousie University and focussed his research on coyote-human conflicts and canine scent detection and search. He is interested in the fundamental science of olfaction and olfactory learning, as well as some applications: His lab has focussed on environmental/conservation, biomedical, and forensic applications of scent processing in dogs.

Recorded ondemand lecture (July, 2015): Pick the brain first: The right nose, breed, and training method will follow.

Sam Gosling is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He did his doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he his dissertation focused personality in spotted hyenas. His non-human research has also examined dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and squid. In 2005 he founded the Animal Personality Institute, an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to understanding personality and temperament in non-human animals. He also does research on Internet-based methods of data collection and on how human personality is manifested in everyday contexts like bedrooms, offices, Facebook profiles, and music preferences; this latter work is described in his book, “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You”. Gosling is the recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution in the area of Comparative Psychology.

Recorded OnDemand Lecture:

Animal Personality: What do we know and where shall we go?