10/20/2026
We don’t just grab a leash, snap it on a collar, and go for a walk.
At Ohana, our team is studying canine ethology, and we’re doing it while we drive. It’s part of our education program called Learning While Driving: between visits, everyone listens to audiobooks from leading dog researchers and we talk about them together at our weekly team meetings.
So what is canine ethology?
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior: watching what animals do, in real-world settings, and working out why they do it. Canine ethology applies that lens to dogs. For a pet care professional, it means pairing up-to-date science on how dogs perceive, think, and communicate with careful observation of the individual dog in front of you.
Because every dog is an individual with layers to them. Marc Bekoff writes about dogs as individuals who contain multitudes. No dog can be fully understood as “just a dog,” or even as the same dog every day. A dog’s behavior can change because:
🐾 they aren’t feeling well
🐾 the lawn service came earlier and they’re still stressed
🐾 the weather, the season, or the time of day is different
🐾 their food changed, they got a new toy, or they lost a favorite one
🐾 they’re picking up on something we can’t detect at all (Alexandra Horowitz reminds us that, next to dogs, our noses leave us pretty chemically challenged!)
That’s why our team doesn’t just do the walk. We observe, we wonder, and we ask what this dog is telling us today. We aim to be curious, observant, analytical, and empathetic, every visit.
This is what education looks like at Ohana.
