I work in the psychology department at a university, and this fact is going two places, so bare with me.
Firstly, what I actually work on has nothing at all to do with dogs, but a lot to do with how we talk about dogs. The lab I work with (I'm a full time research assistant--Master's Degree level) studies scientific learning in children. The current project I'm on is to create an intelligent computer tutor to teach children the control of variables strategy, otherwise known as good experimental design (the project is just starting and things are a little slow, hence my presence on-line). This strategy is not something that is typically intuitive to kids and it does have to be taught fairly straightforwardly. If it isn't taught, kids don't really get it or consider it. An experiment without controlled variables is by definition confounded and invalid. You can't draw any conclusions from it. Yet people, adults, all the time try to draw conclusions from confounded, or anecdotal, or just plain non-experiments. Which really, scientifically, holds no water at all.
What this has to do with this particular forum and topic is that we keep talking about something that can be, and is, in fact scientifically studied. With a properly controlled, replicable experiment, we should be able to draw some conclusions about dog behavior and learning. Right?
The other way this comes back to my job is that I have access to a kick-ass electronic database of journal articles on everything from art history to zoology. I can download these articles as PDFs, email them to anyone I want, print them out and enjoy some nice bathroom reading whenever I want.
So, I thought, why not have a discussion group of some of these articles (classics and newer ones), from peer-reviewed scientific journals, about dog behavior and learning? I can supply the articles easily for all to read, one at a time, and we all have various strong and weak areas and can help each other through the more technical aspects of them. We can talk about conclusions and implications for our own pet dogs and the dogs we work with. I've got a preliminary list of about 8 possible good ones to start with, but I'll wait to see if anyone else is interested.
Because at the end of the day, everyone has an opinion and no argument just based on opinion and anecdotes is ever going to mean a hill of beans to me. I work in a scientific discipline and if something can't be proved through science, I'm not going to pay much attention.
So, anyone interested?