One of the ways to reduce that barking would be to have volunteers come in especially for hte for the dogs and take each dog out for 45 minutes each day and spend quality time with the person - that would help reduce the stress and in fact, one of my students did a study on that.

I'm seeing too many kids where they get fixated on their own autism. I'd rather have them get fixated that they like programming computers or they like art or they want to sing in the church choir or they want to train dogs, you know, something that they can turn into a career.

We found if you took the dog out for 45 minutes a day and worked with it that the solitary stress hormone, cortisol, went down. But then it went right back up again because they didn't keep doing it.

In a dog social cue from a master can override where he saw the being placed. That won't happen unless we have bred a social in tune animal, that's what a dog is. That's why they got so much trouble with separation anxiety - you leave them home alone and they're chewing up the house and stuff. A lot of dogs don't handle being home alone very well.

You have to use food motivation whereas a dog will do things for you just for social motivation, praise and petting. Also with any animal you want to stroke it. Don't pat it, stroke it. Most don't like patting.

Cats are great with clicker training. There's a great video you can get called "Clicker Magic". There's a scene in that video where a cat is trained to go through a mini dog agility course - it's all done with food motivation and clicker training. You can train them to do all sorts of thing.

here's certain things that are similar to cats and dogs. Dogs are just hyper social and they have a want to please you way more than a cat does.

A cat can be social, but a dog, we've bred this hyper social animal that's really truly different and will do stuff for us just to please us with praise and stroking.

Once you can do it all after a lot training with no food reward, the dog is more social. I am not saying that cats are totally unsocial but dogs are more social.