Gibraltarian researcher shares work on dog behaviour at international conference

Gibraltarian researcher Dr Zoë Parr-Cortes is in Fort Collins, Colorado, this week attending the International Working Dog Conference, an international conference on the scientific advances in welfare, health and training of high-quality working dogs. 

Dr Cortes, a research scientist at the University of Bristol, where she is completing her PhD, delivered a talk on her latest work on dogs, entitled “How does dog behaviour and indication strength while searching samples of disease affect handler’s decision making?”

Her talk was based on her work showing how the behaviour detection dogs show when searching samples of disease such as cancer influences whether the dog’s handler decides if the dog has correctly identified a disease-positive sample.

Dr Cortes graduated as a veterinarian at the University of Bristol and, after being in clinical practice for several years, embarked on her PhD research with the Animal Behaviour and Welfare Group at the Bristol Veterinary School in conjunction with Medical Detection Dogs, a charity dedicated to training dogs in the detection and recognition  of the odour of human disease.