It wouldn’t be fair to call Dr. Alexandra ‘Sasha’ Protopopova dog-obsessed. She also enjoys hiking.
With a dog.
“You’re wasting your hike — you have to use it for the dog,” Protopopova laughed.
Protopopova researches animal behaviour science with a focus on companion animals such as dogs and cats. Her work aims to improve the quality of life and adoptability of sheltered animals while learning about their behaviour.
Though her life is filled with dogs today, her first animal companions were a lot smaller. Her parents used to bring back rats from their lab for her to play with when she was young. Protopopova said as a child, she thought the multiple rats her parents brought back over the years were the same one.
“[I thought it was] a very old rat, like a nine-year-old rat,” said Protopopova.
Despite her connection with animals, she hadn’t questioned the ways they are treated until she started working as a dog walker in high school. One of her dog-walking clients, a doberman named Louis, wore a shock collar and a prong collar.
“[The owner told me] that if you say ‘sit’ and the dog doesn’t sit, you choke it with the prong collar, and so I did that and I felt that it was kind of normal,” said Protopopova.
At the same time, an interest in dog training was taking her “deep into blogs” where she learned about Karen Pryor’s “clicker training” method. Hoping to try training Louis herself, she followed the directions to train him to do a high five.
Using Pryor’s method, she only trained using food. The result was great.
“[Louis] was super excited to do the high five," said Protopopova. But when she asked him to sit, using a command taught by Louis’ trainer using the harsh methods she had been told to employ, “the emotion just drained from his face.”
Protopopova realized she had inadvertently “been responsible for harm” by not questioning her prior treatment of the dog.
Still in high school, her newfound love of training and desire to encourage better treatment and more humane methods led Protopopova to work as a dog trainer.
“I actually taught courses in dog training before I had a dog,” said Protopopova. To practice, she would train her parents’ cats. “It grows you as a trainer because you can't sweet-talk cats.”
Protopopova thought she would go on to become a veterinarian “because that’s all you know to do with animals as a child,” and pursued that path when she began her undergraduate degree.
But during her studies, she worked with rhesus macaques — a species of monkey — in a primate cognition lab. There, Protopopova found it closely aligned with her passions learning about training and becoming a dog trainer outside of academia.
While this research was more closely aligned with her interests, Protopopova missed connecting with the animals through training.
When she asked her supervisor at the time if she could train the monkeys they were researching for husbandry to make moving them between cages easier, she was told that they could not be trained “because we need to study natural behaviour only.” But Protopopova recognized the value of empirical knowledge about training and domesticated behaviour.
Protopopova now runs the new animal behaviour lab, a state-of-the-art facility that mimics a living room, complete with fake plants and artwork contributed by lab members, augmented with a one-way mirror and hidden cameras that allow researchers to observe animal behaviour. Protopopova and her group are using the lab for behavioural analysis that has previously been conducted on captive animals but has yet to be done for companion animals.
Protopopova’s research is foundational in this field. She said it can be difficult to choose a research question when there are so many different topics to address. A small sampling of Protopopova's research in the past year alone includes the factors that lead owners to relinquish their dogs to shelters, a comparison of owner-reported behaviour of dogs born in and brought to Canada and a new method of tracking cats in shelters with computer vision.
As companion animals are so closely tied to humans, Protopopova found other issues that may not seem immediately relevant such as climate change and structural racism must be addressed to learn more about and improve treatment. But this closeness also affects the researchers themselves since spending so much time observing animals in less than ideal conditions while not being able to directly take action to improve their quality of life takes an emotional toll on animal behaviourists.
This phenomenon — which Protopopova described as a “moral injury” — leads to burnout and depression among researchers. To combat this, Protopopova encourages her lab members to be proactive in seeking mental health treatment by openly discussing these issues and her own struggles with them.
Though Protopopova’s research at UBC has resulted in less of this injury, in her previous research in the southern United States, she spent a lot of time in shelters.
There, she saw “lots and lots of neglect, lots and lots of cruelty — and that has been quite traumatizing, I’m not going to lie.” Protopopova’s approach to dealing with this trauma “has been counseling, talking to students [and] talking to others about it.”
But she doesn’t think she’s “solved it.”
Outside of her research, Protopopova also helps individual dog owners as a private consultant with her husband, who is also a dog trainer. Between researching dogs, teaching graduate courses about dogs, taking care of dogs and helping others take care of dogs, Protopopova has little time for much else.
“I have been told that, perhaps, I talk too much about dogs.”