A lot of what happens in the Dog Lab happens outside the Dog Lab.
Our closest community partnership is with the Lexington Humane Society, where students and faculty work alongside shelter staff on training, enrichment, behavior, and research.
Students in Applied Dog Behavior typically work with 15–20 adoptable dogs during the semester, getting to know individual animals and developing training and behavior plans that can go home with them when they’re adopted.
Our research team also conducts studies at the shelter, including our ongoing work on dog training and our newest projects with cats.
The partnership works in both directions. Shelter staff know their animals, their adopters, and the practical challenges of animal welfare in ways that we don’t, and their observations and questions regularly shape our thinking. Sometimes a problem we encounter at the Humane Society becomes something we want to investigate more systematically; sometimes something we’re studying in the lab turns out to have an obvious application at the shelter.
We also spend a lot of time talking about animals with people who don’t work in universities. We’ve given public talks around Lexington, visited community groups, worked with students and youth organizations, and contributed accessible, science-based material to educational platforms focused on the dog-human relationship. Students often participate in this work as well—helping with talks, writing for public audiences, and explaining what we’re learning to people outside our field.
Could we help you?
Need a speaker for your organization or community group? We are often happy to talk about dog behavior, animal cognition, training, or what we’re learning through our research.
Have an animal-related problem your organization is trying to solve? Sometimes a sticky real-world problem is exactly the kind of thing our students and faculty enjoy thinking through.
Work with an animal shelter or nonprofit that could use some extra hands? We may be able to connect students with opportunities to help with training, behavior, enrichment, data collection, or another project that fits their skills.
Or maybe you have an idea we haven’t thought of.
We can’t promise we’ll be able to take on every project, but we’re always interested in hearing what’s happening in our community. Reach out and tell us what you need. We’ll see if there’s a way we can help.