Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs.
The Story of Louis Pasteur is a 1936 American black-and-white biographical film from Warner Bros., produced by Henry Blanke, directed by William Dieterle, that stars Josephine Hutchinson, Anita Louise and Donald Woods, and Paul Muni as the renowned scientist who developed major advances in microbiology, which revolutionized agriculture and medicine. The film's screenplay—which tells a highly fictionalized version of Pasteur’s life—was written by Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, and Edward Chodorov (uncredited).
Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.
Clever Hans was a horse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer. He discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues. In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition. Pfungst was an assistant to German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, who incorporated the experience with Hans into his further work on animal psychology and his ideas on phenomenology.
Watership Down is a 1978 British animated adventure-drama film, written, produced and directed by Martin Rosen and based on the 1972 novel by Richard Adams. It was financed by a consortium of British financial institutions and was distributed by Cinema International Corporation in the United Kingdom. Released on 19 October 1978, the film was an immediate success and it became the sixth-most popular film of 1979 at the UK box office.
The Smooth Fox Terrier is a breed of dog, one of many terrier breeds. It was the first breed in the fox terrier family to be given official recognition by The Kennel Club. It is well known, and although not a widely popular breed today outside hunting and show circles, it is extremely significant due to the large number of terriers believed descended from the breed.
Martin Gerald Rosen is an American-British filmmaker and theater producer. He directed the animated film adaptations of Watership Down (1978) and The Plague Dogs (1982), both from the Richard Adams novels.
The Plague Dogs is a 1982 animated adventure drama film, based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Richard Adams. It was written, directed and produced by Martin Rosen, who also directed Watership Down, the film adaptation of another novel by Adams. The Plague Dogs was produced by Nepenthe Productions; it was released by Embassy Pictures in the United States and by United Artists in the United Kingdom. The film was originally released unrated in the United States, but for its DVD release, was later re-rated PG-13 by the MPAA for mature themes such as animal cruelty, violent imagery, and emotionally distressing scenes. The Plague Dogs is the first non-family-oriented MGM animated film, and the first adult animated feature by the studio.
The Sheep-Pig, or Babe, the Gallant Pig in the US, is a children's novel by Dick King-Smith, first published by Gollancz in 1983 with illustrations by Mary Rayner. Set in rural England, where King-Smith spent twenty years as a farmer, it features a lone pig on a sheep farm. It was adapted as the 1995 film Babe, which was a great international success. King-Smith won the 1984 Guardian Children's Fiction Award, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.
Watership Down is an animated fantasy children's television series, adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name by Richard Adams. The second adaptation of the novel, it was produced by UK's Alltime Entertainment and Canada's Decode Entertainment in association with Martin Rosen, with the participation of the Canadian Television Fund, the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit and the Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit from the Government of Ontario.
Dogsbody is a 1975 children's novel by British writer Diana Wynne Jones, first published by Macmillan. It tells the story of Sirius, a star who is forced to live in the body of a dog on Earth. The book was Wynne Jones' fifth full-length novel.
The Fox and the Hound is a 1967 novel written by American novelist Daniel P. Mannix and illustrated by John Schoenherr. It follows the lives of Tod, a red fox raised by a human for the first year of his life, and Copper, a half-bloodhound dog owned by a local hunter, referred to as the Master. After Tod causes the death of the man's favorite hound, man and dog relentlessly hunt the fox, against the dual backdrops of a changing human world and Tod's normal life in hunting for food, seeking a mate, and defending his territory. As preparation for writing the novel, Mannix studied foxes, both tame and wild, a wide variety of hunting techniques, and the ways hounds appear to track foxes, seeking to ensure his characters acted realistically.
Ronald Mathias Lockley was a Welsh ornithologist and naturalist. He wrote over fifty books on natural history, including a major study of shearwaters, and many articles. He is perhaps best known for his book The Private Life of the Rabbit.
The history of animal testing goes back to the writings of the Ancient Greeks in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, with Aristotle and Erasistratus one of the first documented to perform experiments on nonhuman animals. Galen, a physician in 2nd-century Rome, dissected pigs and goats, and is known as the "Father of Vivisection." Avenzoar, an Arabic physician in 12th-century Moorish Spain who also practiced dissection, introduced animal testing as an experimental method of testing surgical procedures before applying them to human patients. Although the exact purpose of the procedure was unclear, a Neolithic surgeon performed trepanation on a cow in 3400-3000 BCE. This is the earliest known surgery to have been performed on an animal, and it is possible that the procedure was done on a dead cow in order for the surgeon to practice their skills.
In a group of animals, a runt is a member which is significantly smaller or weaker than the others. Owing to its small size, a runt in a litter faces obvious disadvantage, including difficulties in competing with its siblings for survival and possible rejection by its mother. Therefore, in the wild, a runt is less likely to survive infancy.
An animal tale or beast fable generally consists of a short story or poem in which animals talk. They may exhibit other anthropomorphic qualities as well, such as living in a human-like society. It is a traditional form of allegorical writing.
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather. Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioral traits to wild as well as domesticated animals.
Professor David Grainger Marcus Wood-Gush FRSE was a South African-born animal geneticist and ethologist based for most of his professional life in Edinburgh. He was an expert on animal behaviour and academic author in this field. He was one of the first to study the impacts of factory farming. He advocated the study of animal behaviour to gauge what implied "humane treatment" for different species, and tried to balance these factors against economic viability for the farmer. He looked at the impact of stress upon animals and held that animals should be treated as individuals not as a "commodity". In these studies he concluded that food supply was the essential factor in controlling animal behaviour.
Dogs played various roles during the time of the American Revolutionary War. In addition to formal uses like their role in hunting, dogs often accompanied their owners while they were fighting and provided comfort for their owners and those with them in camps. During this time, dogs were being newly studied in science and depicted in art.
The Cão de Gado Transmontano or Transmontano Mastiff is a breed of livestock guardian dog from Portugal. It originates in the historical province of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro in north-eastern Portugal, and is a rare breed confined mostly to this area.
