Nearly every con that offers AD or 18+ panels has had some kind of pet or pup event: they’re typically meet-and-greets, or how-to guides for common practices designed for an audience of all experiences.
We’d like to do something else entirely. In this panel, we hope to investigate the psychological and sociological phenomena which make pup play fun, and which make it such an emotionally important part of many of our lives.
Both presenters are published researchers and have an appetite for the academic. The body of research which can help explain the mechanics of pup play is surprisingly large—spanning from B.F. Skinner's groundbreaking 1963 paper on operant conditioning, to Darren Langdridge and Jamie Lawson’s 2019 phenomenological investigation of pup play. Combining contemporary human- and animal-behavioral research with our own experiences, case studies, and interviews, we hope to illuminate not just how pup play is done, but why it's so appealing: making the science accessible to a wide audience of practitioners who might not know exactly what goes on under the hood.
