[Tyncneiff]

DOG ADOPTIONS

Matching dogs and people

There must be a better way than love at first sight, and Diane Mollaghan is trying to find out how at the Austin shelter

By Denise Gamino
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF


Diane Mollaghan is the in-house shrink at Austin's city-run animal shelter.

She stares down dogs, walks into their cages and pets them — even the rude ones that tower over her thin 5 feet with dirty paws propped on her shoulders. She takes them for a short walk to her trailer house laboratory to play tug-of-war with a slobbered chew toy.

This is where she gives her "Doggy GED" test: Does the dog respond to a "sit" cue? Lay down? Shake? Fetch?

Dogs, like humans, don't pick up on Mollaghan's native Irish accent. She hides it well, unlike the large red roses and blue fairies permanently splashed over both arms. Another tattoo, a Neolithic goddess symbol of three overlapping circles, peeks from the V-neck of her blue hospital scrub top.

Mollaghan (pronounced MOLL-a-HAN) has been obsessed with the canine mind since she was 3 years old in Dublin trying to train the family poodle, Cindy. But dogs aren't her only interest.

At the Town Lake Animal Center, Mollaghan also studies the personalities of humans. Are you extroverted or reserved? Mollaghan wants to know. Quarrelsome or sympathetic? Open to new experiences or conventional? And so on. Her personality test also looks at how and why people choose a pet. (The voluntary test was given in 2005-2006 to pet adopters after they had been approved for an adoption.)

Watch out. She's on to us. We might say we're looking for a certain breed or personality, but, in reality, we're driven by emotions. Love at first sight sways us. Floppy ears or big, soulful eyes are all it takes to persuade us to adopt a dog.

In the future, Mollaghan, a former Boston dog catcher, may be known as the Dog Matcher.

Mollaghan, 35, is a graduate student at the University of Texas writing a master's thesis while working full time at the Town Lake Animal Center as an applied animal behaviorist. Her cutting-edge research, conducted under the auspices of UT's Animal Personality Institute and not funded by the animal shelter, is evaluating how human traits predict our compatibility for certain personality traits in dogs. She hopes to develop tests that can assess a dog's personality and then help match humans to the best pet. That way, there is less chance of a breakup or relinquishment to a shelter that may have to kill the dog.

"Traditionally, pet ownership has been treated far too casually, and I hope to be part of the cultural shift that influences our perception of what responsible pet ownership entails," she says. "Honestly, if we can just get people to stop and realistically appraise their lifestyle and personality, and what role they want the pet to play in their life, it will be a step in the right direction.

"For instance, is a more introverted individual best suited to a dog that craves a lot of social attention and is the life of the party, or would that person be best suited with a dog that is mildly fearful and submissive and more reserved socially? We can, theoretically, improve matching people's personality with the right pet personality to ensure the best relationship. But, just like human relationships, looks count."

Nine times out of 10, people who responded to Mollaghan's personality questions admitted they picked their dog because of "love at first sight" or because they believed the pet needed them.

Mollaghan says her preliminary data "suggests that just like in human personality judgment studies, humans are quite good at judging some (dog) traits accurately based on no behavioral data, but not others. Aggression and fear are easily detected by humans, but traits such as activity and reactivity, like a bouncing Jack Russell terrier, are often misjudged by humans as sociability.

"This happens time and again at the shelter, where people choose the highly reactive and active maniacs because they think they are friendly and actively soliciting their attention. Then, I come along and perform the personality assessment and enter the kennel only to get mauled by the dog, plastered with poopy paw prints and scratches and walk out looking like I've just been in a centrifuge."

Destructive, or just timid?

One of the dogs Mollaghan tested recently was an 18-month-old female Lab mix named Bailey.

Bailey originally had been adopted from the shelter, but the family returned the small black dog because she chewed everything indoors and outdoors, including furniture and even the drywall. The family also said Bailey barked a lot.

Mollaghan had none of that information when she tested Bailey's personality.

She stood in front of Bailey's pen at the shelter and, without a word, stared hard through the chain-link gate for a full minute. Inside the cage, Bailey wilted under Mollaghan's gaze. Her rear legs trembled. She started to pant, a sign of stress. Within seconds, she whimpered and backed as far away as she could.

"She's showing signs of conflict behavior," Mollaghan said. The dog held its ears back, its tail down and had dilated pupils, signals that told Mollaghan the dog wanted to meet her but was not sure of what to do.

Then, Mollaghan opened the pen's gate and slipped inside. She is short enough to stand up straight inside a concrete pen with an inch of head room to spare. Again, Mollaghan didn't say anything, but just stood against the wall. Bailey continued to back away and appeared frightened.

But, after another minute, Mollaghan crouched down and Bailey approached.

"Hi there. Hi," Mollaghan said. "Are you stressed out? Huh? Huh?"

Bailey came to nuzzle Mollaghan, who tried to groom her. Immediately, she noticed the dog's ears were infected. "Did someone forget to take care of your ears?" she asked the dog.

Bailey tried to get in Mollaghan's lap, but the behaviorist said that action was not aggression. "I think she's just looking for comfort," she said.

Soon, Bailey was licking Mollaghan, so much that Mollaghan laughed as she left the cage. "I'm slimed," she said.

Mollaghan then took Bailey for a short walk and led her to the old trailer house for some obedience tests. But Bailey dug in her heels and refused to walk up the four concrete steps. "It's possible this dog has never been inside before," she said.

It took Bailey several minutes to work up the courage to walk up the ramp. Inside, Bailey earned no more than a "Doggy GED" because the only cue she knew was "sit."

Overall, Mollaghan scored Bailey as somewhat sociable, submissive, calm, timid and hesitant. But back in her office, she called up Bailey's record on the computer. Only then did she discover Bailey was listed as a barking, biting and destructive dog. That description hardly described the dog that Mollaghan had just tested.

"This kind of destructive behavior is treatable," she said. "How long was she left alone with no stimulation? Go figure. A lot of people just aren't prepared to accommodate a dog."

More than half the dogs taken to animal shelters in the United States are euthanized. At the Town Lake shelter, that number is 44 percent.

Mollaghan would love to reduce the number of dogs killed, a task that she must help with at the shelter.

"In Diane's perfect shelter world, every dog would get a fair shake, no pun intended," she said.

In recent years, many animal shelters in the United States, Canada and Europe, including Austin's city-run center, have embraced the idea of testing dogs' behaviors in hopes of reducing the number of unwanted dogs. The more information pet adopters have about themselves and a shelter dog, the more likely the adoption will be a success, the shelters believe. And more successful adoptions mean fewer dogs in shelters.

"People are going to be more successful with a pet, we believe, if that pet comes closest to matching their expectation," said Dorinda Pulliam, director of the Town Lake shelter, which is contemplating a controversial move to East Austin. The shelter's old pens and buildings are cramped, and proponents of a move argue for a larger site with new facilities.

Pulliam is a firm supporter of Mollaghan's research. She is especially excited about the attempt to find the best way to test a dog's personality.

"We have a responsibility to make sure the animals are safe for adoption," Pulliam said. On average, about 12 percent of the dogs adopted from the shelter between 1999 and 2006 have come back to the shelter, either as strays or relinquished by owners, she said.

"There's never been a connection between the behavior tests and the outcomes for the animals. There's just nothing out there to help answer that question," Pulliam said.

Mollaghan gave four tests to nearly 800 dogs, and at the same time she asked prospective owners to assess their reasons for adopting. Some parts of the dog tests were simple: just stare at the dog for one minute without saying a word. Other parts required props and costumes: using a fake rubber hand to try to steal a dog's food dish or walking into the room with the aid of a cane while dressed in a oversized yellow raincoat to depict a stranger.

People coming to the center to adopt a dog are given the results of Mollaghan's dog personality test if the dog they are interested in is one she has tested. These days, while writing her thesis, she tests only 8 to 20 dogs each day. About 37 dogs enter the shelter daily.

Perfect match

Bailey was fortunate. Michael Turlak, a photographer from Lago Vista, adopted her just days after Mollaghan tested her. And, just like most everyone else, it was love at first sight.

"I saw her on the Internet late at night, like at 11 o'clock, and called and left a message: "I have to have this dog. She's such a cute dog."

The shelter called him early the next morning and told him the previous owners had relinquished the dog because of destructive behavior. "I said, 'That's probably just because the previous owners didn't spend enough time with her.' "

Turlak wanted Bailey no matter what. "Unless she bit me when I went in her cage, it was a done deal."

But he also received Mollaghan's test results. He knew she had recommended a patient owner, a quiet environment, an active exercise routine to prevent boredom that may have led to her destruction problems, and confidence-building routines. He lives in the country and could follow the suggestions.

So far, it's been a perfect match, one aided in part by Mollaghan's personality tests.

"Not all shelter stories have a happy ending," she said, "but Bailey's story brings hope that matching people and pets based on personality can lead to more successful relationships, and ultimately save lives."

dgamino@statesman.com; 445-3675


Moving here from Boston, with a pit bull

Diane Mollaghan's small stature, short hair, large hazel eyes and freckles give her a pixie appearance. Think Peter Pan with jet-black dyed hair. But she's absolutely calm and fearless around the thousands of unfamiliar dogs she encounters at the Austin shelter.

A pit bull attacked her in Boston when she was an animal control officer there, and her wrist was broken. But that didn't stop Mollaghan from adopting a pit bull from the Boston shelter. She brought Hercules with her when she moved to Austin in 2000.

Mollaghan emigrated from Ireland to the United States when she was 16 to join her older sister and brother in the New York City area. The move got her away from Athlone, a small Irish town on the Shannon River where her parents had moved to open a pub. The town had no animal shelter but had a rough element she wanted to leave behind. She graduated from high school in Westchester County, and then moved to Manhattan to work before college. She helped manage a retro clothing shop in Greenwich Village and worked as a nanny for a family in Little Italy, which enabled her to take the child in her care to the Central Park Zoo, where she was a volunteer.

She studied biology at Hunter College, then moved to Boston and continued her studies at the University of Massachusetts. There, she became an animal ambulance driver for the Animal Rescue League and, later, an animal control officer for the city.

She chose Austin at random for a move and began working at the Town Lake Animal Center once she hit town.

She enrolled at the University of Texas and studied under professor Sam Gosling and his Animal Personality Institute. She started out studying fish and white-tailed deer, and then her shelter work made it possible to pursue a master's thesis on dog behavior and pet matching.

Recently, Mollaghan began moonlighting as a dog behaviorist, working with private clients who need help adapting to their dog or determining the best routine and training regime for their dog. Her company, Urban Canine Companion, can be found on the Web at www.theurbancaninecompanion.com.

— Denise Gamino





Dog shopping quiz

From 2005-2006, animal behaviorist Diane Mollaghan administered a short personality test to prospective pet adopters at Town Lake Animal Center. Here is a sample of what adopters were asked about their selection process.


I selected my new pet using the following methods:

1. Love at first sight

2. The one who needs me the most

3. By spending time with the pet

4. The pet's behavioral history

5. Advice from the adoption counselor

6. Consult professional

7. Books/magazines

8. Advice from family

9. Reminder of former pet

10. Other, please explain

http://www.statesman.com/life/conten...svc=7&cxcat=48

[WeestDype]

i've saw test like that, lol,,, if you had pics of ppl could you guess what dogs they have at home,,,lol,,, some u can some u can't,,some these test are silly but i think there would be alot more APBT's adopted if they would help educate ppl about these dogs when ppl come in to adopt a dog

[SpeavaJap]

I am a new pit owner and would like any advice i can get. My female pit is my first i also have 2 chawawas and they seem to get along ok but the pit is only 2 months old and i have heard so many bad things but she is just so sweet and cute I hope i am not making a mistake by bringing this dog into my family

[Nfvzjvcl]

Mrl2491: Many many people here have multi-dog homes with pit bulls in them - and lots of other chihuahua owners

Check out these threads:
http://www.pitbull-chat.com/showthread.php?t=1513
http://www.pitbull-chat.com/showthread.php?t=7289
http://www.pitbull-chat.com/showthread.php?t=3110