About Animal Mind Notes

What Animal Mind Notes is for

Animal Mind Notes explains research on how animals think, learn and cope, in language you can read over breakfast. We cover cognition and welfare studies and what an experiment actually asked the animals to do. We also look at how a finding might play out with a dog in your kitchen.

Nora Vance and the names on our pieces

Nora Vance is our contributing writer and looks over what we publish. Nora starts from the study itself wherever it can be read, then writes the plain version. If a later reading shows an error, Nora goes back and fixes it. Everyone writing here uses a pen name. When a piece describes behavior at home, the writer is drawing on their own home, dogs and routines.

Why the pictures are general

Every image here is either a licensed stock photo or an editorial illustration marked as one. You won’t see any writer’s home in them. A photo of a dog working at a puzzle feeder is there to show the topic. It doesn’t mean we ran that experiment or tried that feeder, unless the article tells you so.