Time to say good bye

Diary entry, 29.04.2011, Angelica da Silva - Vasconcellos

Pictures of the day (6 images)   

After fifteen months living in Ernstbrunn and studying all these nice dogs and wolves in the Wolf Science Center, it’s time to say goodbye! In other blogs, I’ve already told you about my experiments on social stress (07/04/2010 and 13/08/2010), wolf training (14/06/2010), wolf walks (21/08/2010 and 16/10/2010), exploration of novel objects (04/12/2010), wolf petting x training (24/02/2011) and dog petting x training (20/04/2011). Now, it’s time to analyse all my 511 (!!!) videos and 1.347 saliva samples to find out what they tell me about our animals. Part of the behavioural and physiological data I could already analyse (social stress and wolf training) and these brought interesting information: the stress in captive wolf packs is higher in higher ranking individuals; the wolves seem pretty motivated for training, spending about 83% of the time in the session concentrated on the trainer and the task.
There is a lot more to find out but, as I had a pre-defined time to spend here, I have to keep analyzing these data at home, unfortunately far from Ernstbrunn and our beloved animals: in Brazil. I’m already missing them and the people from the Wolf Science Center, but I have no choice. Thanks to all nice people who supported me at work, as well as in personal matters (social support) in the WSC, and special thanks to dogs and wolves, which were very patient all this time, allowing me to observe them for hours and hours, and giving us their (precious) saliva samples!