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In this week’s Pet Connection, Dr. Marty Becker and Gina Spadafori tackle the tough issue of pet behavior problems:

Biting, destructiveness, noisiness, house-soiling — these problems can be more of a threat to a pet than a disease such as cancer. That’s because too often behavior problems are eventually “solved” by getting rid of the pet, a solution that’s often a dead end for the animal.

Even when people refuse to give up on their pets, behavior problems can mean a lifetime of misery. “Bad” pets may spend their lives locked up, locked out or punished in ways that reflect the frustration and ignorance of their owners but do nothing to solve the problems. It’s safe to say that neither side realizes the full benefits of the human-animal bond in such sad situations.

It doesn’t have to be that way. While some behavior problems aren’t fixable, most can be. To accomplish such change, though, you have to be prepared to put some time into changing the situation. Quick-fix, half-hearted efforts are doomed from the start.

Seeds are a treat for birds, not a diet, our Dr. Becker reminds bird onwers.  Get more info here.

In “The Buzz,” Dr. Becker and Mikkel Becker Shannon write about what your dog’s guilty look really means:

Your dog may look guilty, but he’s not feeling that way. A study published in the journal Behavioral Processes had dog owners tell their pets to leave a tasty treat alone before leaving the room. Researchers found that whether or not the dog showed the “guilty” look did not depend on whether the dog had eaten the treat or not, but rather on whether the owner had scolded the dog. Dogs who didn’t eat the treat but were scolded by their owners displayed the “guilty” look more than dogs who had actually eaten the treat, but their owners did not believe they had, and thus didn’t get scolded. The research suggests that “guilt” seen in dogs is not really an effect of the unwanted behavior that the dog performed, but is instead a reaction to the owner’s behavior.

Want more? Read the entire Pet Connection for this week, or view the page (PDF) as it went out to our newspaper clients.