How to Be a Better Human - How to experience the world like a good dog (w/ Alexandra Horowitz)

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Can our dogs feel guilt? Or have they successfully trained us with their puppy eyes to win a treat and extra kibble? Alexandra Horowitz is a researcher and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College; she joins Chris to chat about how dogs make us laugh and ways to be more present in life.For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. In today's episode, we're going to talk a lot about attention and about noticing. But despite the fact that this is a show for humans, on today's episode, we're going to be getting our advice from dogs. Today's guest, Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, is a world-renowned scientist who studies canine cognition. That is to say, her job is to figure out what dogs think and know and feel. And she is going to help us figure out how to pay attention. into the world, like a dog.

To get us started, here's a clip from a video Alexandra made about her research with Ted Ed, and this clip is narrated by Pen Pen Chen. If you can smell a spritz of perfume in a small room, a dog would have no trouble smelling it in an enclosed stadium and distinguishing its ingredients to boot. And everything in the street, every passing person or car, any contents of the neighbor's trash,

each type of tree, and all the birds and insects in it, has a distinct odor profile telling your dog what it is, where it is, and which direction it's moving in. Besides being much more powerful than ours, a dog's sense of smell can pick up things that can't even be seen at all. A whole separate olfactory system called the vomoral nasal organ above the roof of the mouth detects the hormones all animals, including humans, naturally release.

It lets dogs identify potential mates or distinguish between friendly and hostile animals. It alerts them to our various emotional states, and it can even tell them when someone is pregnant or sick. Because olfaction is more primal than other senses, bypassing the thalamus to connect directly to the brain structures involving emotion and instinct, we might even say a dog's perception is more immediate and visceral than ours. But the most amazing thing about your dog's nose is that it can traverse time.

The past appears in tracks left by passers-by, and by the warmth of a recently parked car, or the residue of where you've been and what you've done recently. Landmarks like fire hydrants and trees are aromatic bulletin boards carrying messages of who's been by, what they've been eating, and how they're feeling. And the future is in the breeze, alerting them to something or someone approaching long before you see them.

Where we see and hear something at a single moment, a dog smells an entire story from start to finish. We are going to have a lot more story for you, our human listeners, and for any time-traveling dog companions you've got with you right after this quick break. Don't go anywhere. Today on the podcast, we're talking to Alexander Horowitz about what we can learn about being human, being present, and paying attention from dogs. Hi, I'm Alexandra Horowitz. I'm the head of the dog cognition lab at Barnard College and an author. So, Alexandra, you study dogs, and a lot of people know you for your book.

inside of a dog. But I also am really interested because you wrote this book that I am passionate about and have recommended to so many people called Onlooking, which is just about seeing the world in different ways. So can you give us the kind of two-sentence description of what Unlooking is? Thank you so much. That's very nice of you to say. Unlooking really grew out of my experience with dogs, actually, where I was starting to see the world differently through trying to see it through dog's eyes or the dog's nose as it happens. And I decided that I would do a book of walks around my neighborhood with people who had different ways of seeing and try to see what else there was to see in that same sort of boring set of blocks that I was very used to walking.

And it was a terrific exercise for me because it was all about perspective, which is what you have to keep in mind all the time as a scientist, and especially when you're studying a non-human. But all the work I did with dogs, which was about trying to understand what dogs know and understand an experience of the world, really fed back into my own life completely. So my own relationship with my dog and trying to think about her

and what she needed and wanted and thought about. But then also how I viewed other people, and thought about their lives and what they knew and wanted and thought about. It really was like a perspective and empathy opening exercise. And it continues to be, right? Like it's an ongoing. It's not something that I did that project and then it's done. I'm done looking.

That's my lifetime. We've fulfilled the quota. Now I know. Now it's unknowing. Now this is something that I think anyone who has a pet, but especially a dog, can relate to, which is that before you explore, your home or your neighborhood with your pet. You did not stop in the same places.

You did not notice the same details. And all of a sudden, your dog being so fascinated by that particular corner, by that particular tree stump, by the fire hydrant on this stretch, it makes you pay attention to it in a different way. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly right. I mean, from the very first moment you leave your house, I live in the city, but wherever you live and head out in your morning, you're going to work or you're exercising.

Typically, we just sort of stop looking. We're no longer looking. If there's something wildly different, we might notice it. We might notice it, right? And especially in New York, where you're kind of inured to the presence of things on the street, even people, we're constitutionally sort of not supposed to look in a way. And so, yeah, we ignore everything around us. And even though I could tell you that I'd passed buildings or vehicles.

or people or trees on my route. I know that more conceptually than perceptually, right? Like I didn't experience them. So having to go a dog's pace allows you to see a lot of things. Every time you stop and stare up at the building while your dog's nose is staring down at the sidewalk, there's something there you haven't seen before. Is it ghost writing? Is it funny brickwork?

Is it a bird who's perched there or whatever? You just notice things. And then as soon as you notice one thing, it leads to a number. other thing to notice. And so it's contagious. And I really am thankful to my dogs for showing me that. I think that also one of the reasons why people who maybe aren't necessarily science people or don't think of themselves as science people, why people are so drawn to your research and wanting to understand it is because there's this deep curiosity people feel that is tied to that noticing with that dog of what is my dog actually experiencing? What is my dog thinking? When they get

excited about that leaf. Why? What is it that is making that happen? And you spent a lot of your career trying to answer those questions in a really rigorous way. Yeah, those why questions, right? Because I also was a person who lived with a dog. And I also have those exact questions. And when I was a couple of years into studying dogs, which I didn't start doing because I was interested in dogs for the sake of dogs, actually, it was because they were sort of a good model for studying this idea of theory of mind in non-human others during play. Boom, boring. But it turned out that got me studying dogs.

And I saw that the things I learned from my own research and then from other people's research as more people started doing this, I translated immediately to living how I thought about living with her and started to answer questions about, you know, what she was doing. And that got me then listening to other people's questions and also the ways they talk to dogs, right? And the things they make assumptions about with dogs. And so the very fact of how we live with dogs becomes its own kind of empirical subject. So, yeah, it's been very fertile. For people who aren't aware of what it means, let's talk a little bit about that theory of mind.

What is that? What is that? Oh, a theory of mind is this notion that, a psychological notion, of a ability we all develop as children to think about other people's perspectives, essentially, to know that as I talk to Chris Duffy, you, Chris, know, want, think about things that are different than what I know want or think about.

There might be similarities, but you have your own knowledge set. And it's important, children are sort of wildly egocentric in some sense, you know. So you have a very young child, right? You know, if you say they can't have a cookie that's in front of them on the table, they will, well, maybe not take that cookie, right? But at about three years old or so, if you leave the room, they have a great insight. You no longer know whether they're taking the cookie or not. Because your knowledge state is different than their knowledge state.

And this leads to deception. It also leads to, like, a lot of interesting higher cognitive abilities. And it's a really open question whether non-human animals have this ability. Think about other animals' minds in the way that we do. One of your studies, which I always find so fascinating, and I know is like it prompts the most outraged debate, not because they're offended by the study, but because it challenges something that they believe themselves about their dogs when I tell people about it, is you did quite, in my opinion, and very well-designed study to look at whether dogs display guilt, whether when you say,

my dog is looking guilty because he knows that he wasn't supposed to eat that on the table and he jumped up and ate it, whether that is, in fact, a dog displaying guilt or not. Tell us about what you found in that stuff. I got very interested in these sort of anthropomorphisms that we make of dogs, where we attribute to them what we know are human qualities. And dogs have this guilty look, right? And it's become a kind of internet phenomenon, frankly, just dog shaming, you know, sort of like a sign around a dog's neck saying,

I know I ate the couch pillow. And I'm so sorry or something. And they have, yeah, sort of hang dog look, right? Which is maybe their ears back or their head aside or their tail is low and wagging ferociously. And people assume when the dog gives them that look, that they've done something wrong, in quotes, and that they know they did something wrong, so they feel guilty about it. And I thought, well, I don't know that. And, you know, as a scientist, I can set up a really simple experiment to just test what prompts that look.

Is it having done something wrong and then maybe feeling guilty about it because they know it's wrong? Or is it something else? And it turned out it was something else. It was not whether they did something wrong. It was, in this case, it was eating a bit of food that was forbidden for them. it was whether the owner thought they had eaten the food. When the owners thought they had eaten the food and were kind of coming in to scold them, the dogs give the most guilty look.

And that was even if they had not eaten the food, so they had nothing to feel guilty about, they would still do the look. Yes, that's right. But if they ate the food and the owner thought that they hadn't, they didn't give as much look at all, right? So it wasn't their sort of internal sense of, Jewish guilt that made them give this look. It was their response to us. And they're very good at reading our behavior even before we sort of know we're behaving, you know, for them to read. And they put on this

basically appeasing or you could call it submissive look, which is designed to look pretty cute and hopefully to avoid the punishment that it looks like is coming. So it's not to say dogs can't feel guilt. It's, you know, as you rightly expressed it, it's more about whether that look is evidence of their feeling guilt. And it really isn't. This is one of the ways in which I think your research, for me, informs how I think about being a human, even aside from the whole dog part of it, which is that we can create a narrative in even more than create the narrative. We can prompt that narrative into existence and believe that it is outside of us when in fact it is entirely coming from us, right?

Like, I'm like, oh, that dog feels so guilty. He's looking at me guilty. And in fact, it's like, the dog is reading me and thinking, I better look guilty because I'm getting the energy from Chris that says you better look guilty. And I wouldn't even know that I'm making that happen. I think with the dogs, I've been looking at it more carefully because I'm just my interest in the dogs, but it's an interpersonal dynamic for sure, right? Imagine bringing just anger, resentment, or stress into any dynamic with somebody.

It's not like you aren't wearing it all over yourself and like seeping it out with everything you say and how you present yourself and how you react to things. We are, right, even when we think we're being subtle. And actually, we're pretty good at picking up on that as humans. It's interesting to me that we don't pick up as well on what the dogs are actually doing, right? We sort of put emotions and thoughts and feelings onto them. without looking at them often. We're doing this series on the podcast in January.

That's about how to have more laughter and humor in your life. And for me, one of the big pieces that I think of when I think of how to laugh more in your life is to start with noticing things because laughter, I think, is magical because it is so, it forces us to be present. You like, when you are laughing, especially when you're laughing with someone else, You are both locked into that moment. And I think that your book on looking, but also your research with dogs and the way you talk about it, it is a really interesting way of getting people to be present, to be in the moment. And I also think there is like this is a place where there is a clear one-to-one, which is any dog owner can tell you that they have laughed really hard at something that their dog did or at something that they experienced with their dog because it's really easy to be present with an animal.

I completely agree with that. agree with this idea that like the humor is in the details, right? There is a ton of pleasure for me in noticing anything, just the delight of noticing it, which isn't inherently funny, right? But just it's almost like, oh, like, who knew, right? How do, I'd never seen that. I've never smelled that. Like, what, I just heard this and that almost like just the experience of being alive. If you're super engaged in it. is like delightful. Is that like a really big belly laugh funny?

Not always. But I think it does open up that possibility too. What is the last time or a time that you can remember where a dog or your dog made you laugh? We live with two dogs, Tilda and Quiddity. And they're sort of differently sized. And they're just really different people. But sometimes they just get it together

and have like a great romp, rough and tumble play. I just lose it. I mean, I just laugh and laugh. It's just funny to me to be kind of affiliated with their pleasure, right? Like it's a laugh of, it's almost like contagious laughter, even though I can't always hear them laughing in play. Their pleasure is my pleasure. So that happens regularly. But even just silly things they do when one of them needs attention and Tilda needs attention and is not getting it from us. And she'll go and find. And she'll go and find. one of Quiddity's favorite pelican toys and bring it in proudly. And it's just fun to see her manipulating our attention and seeing, you know,

figuring out how to work with these like slow humans. That's funny to me. And is there a dog equivalent to laughter or a dog analog to laughter? But they do have a play pant, right, which is this sort of breathy exhalation that they do in play. but you'd have to get like really up in there with them to hear it in their play. It's a kind of kind of sound like a chimpanzee might make in play. They were the sort of original non-human play panters. And then there was a researcher who found that dogs play pant as well.

So we call that a laughter because it's used in laughing contexts, in playful contexts, and it's different than the pant that they use when they're hot or stressed. So yeah, I think they're laughing. It's also, you know, when you think about kids, human children, some of the first laughs that kids have are from these very primal types of jokes, right? Like, I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm chasing you or I'm tickling you like a play attack that's actually not an attack. That is what gets kids laughing.

And it seems like that same type of joke, if we could call it that, is what makes a dog laugh too. Isn't there also an evolutionary story that laughter and smiling are kind of like fear responses a little bit as well, right? So the chimpanzee, for instance, has a fear grin. They're big grin. If you see a chimp grinning, they're not like a super happy chimp. They're one who's worried about the situation and trying to put on like the guilty look, this appeasing gesture to sort of tone down what they see, the tension that they see happening. And certainly I've done that. I've walked into a party where I didn't know a lot of people.

and been like, oh no, here's time for the big fear grand. Hey, oh yeah, I remember you. Of course, I know your name. We've met before. Yeah. Hi. Teeth. The whole thing, yeah.

But there's a out of comfort zone area that I think dogs, chimps, and little people especially. But, you know, we'll laugh nervously, right? So the laugh comes up in lots of other contexts as adults rather than just like true funniness. We're going to take a quick break and then we will have more from Alexandra. So take a second to laugh nervously. And by the time you're done, we'll be right back with you. And we are back. The vast majority of people who are listening to this, I would venture to say,

you are the only professional canine cognition researcher who is going to be involved in this podcast, whether as a listener or an interviewer. But I think there's many pieces of your research that can be applied to people who have dogs in their own life and even to people who do not have a pet at all. So I would love for you to be a little prescriptive here and say, how can we notice and be more present in our everyday lives? My book Unlucking is actually a good place to start with that. I walked with other people for a reason. I gave them a kind of blank slate of just walking together on an ordinary route, not like a special area of the city where there's a lot to see, but sort of some place where there's nothing to see, and just ask them to show me what they saw. And they're showing me that allowed me to see more of whatever it was, were they a geologist who could recognize the blue stone sitting next to the limestone, right?

or somebody who knew a lot about the history of lettering and signs and fonts who got me looking at the 10 million kinds of letters in the city. So even though they're the ones that had the expertise, it was just like following their gaze that allowed me to start to notice more of whatever that category of things was, insect tracks, urban wildlife, or geology or letters, and how people walk this kind of thing. with a doctor and a physical therapist, and that's never left me, even though I'm not an expert in diagnosing disease by watching people walk, I could start to see some of what they saw

by walking with them. So just like grab anybody you know, it doesn't have to be an ex, like the world-renowned expert in canine cognition. It could just be anybody who has just something they like to think about. Is it fashion? Is it color matching? Is it brickwork? Is it whatever it is, shadows, like people's hats and have a walk with them and ask them to show you what they see. And I guarantee they'll see things that you aren't seeing. And you'll start to notice more of them too, right? Like almost chasing to get ahead of them to notice that next hat that comes around the corner or whatever it is. And obviously you could do this with another person. But, you know, I love that this framework you can actually even do alone. Like I watched a

really fun documentary on bird watching, and I am not a bird watcher, and I had never thought about that. And then I walk outside and instantly I notice, oh, there's the sound of a bird. Oh, there's something flying over there. I wonder what that is. Or, you know, I grew up in a tiny apartment. And so we never had to do like any sort of home repair or home maintenance, but now I live in a home. And so all of a sudden, I've become aware of like roofs and pipes as things that are possible problems that you have to pay attention to. But it actually is kind of fascinating

to then walk around my neighborhood and go, huh, what kind of gutters do houses have? Like, oh, I never even thought of the idea that there's variation in the thing that catches water that comes off your roof. And you walk around and it just opens my awareness to new possibilities. Yeah, absolutely.

I love your gutter collection. And that's sort of what it is. It's almost like collecting observations, right? And maybe you pick a category of thing or a color or whatever. And having somebody else or just watching something which introduces an idea is, I think, a good way into it. Otherwise, it might be hard to like Ab initio, like just say, oh, yeah, today I'm looking more. I think it's easy to just, easier to just pick one thing to look for that one thing. It just focuses your mind and your perception and all of your sensory modalities.

And then you start noticing a lot of them. So you can sort of, it scaffolds you into being a bigger observer. So one thing that you taught me and that I've never forgotten is that among the frameworks that you can shift, right? We as humans, most of us, tend to experience the world primarily through sight. That's our primary sense for most of us. However, for dogs, they experience it primarily through scent, like their nose is the primary sense organ. Dogs have a very different sense of like what time traveling would be because sense

linger in a way that visual sites don't. So a dog is experiencing the world and saying like, you were over there 10 minutes ago. I smell that you were over there. And I smell that the squirrel took this path. And their primary sense is giving. them this also like ability to time travel into the past. I'm delighted that stayed with you because I think it is a really transformative way to think about dogs and smell and ourselves, right?

Because at some level, if we spent more time smelling, we would have some of that kind of superpower ourselves. Yeah, I think it changes so much about how I think about dogs to realize that they're smelling, you know, that they're out there nose first because of everything about how smells work, you know. So it's not just that they're sort of traveling into the past, but they can almost smell a little into the future because they sort of will be able to smell the thunderstorm that's coming or the person that's coming around the corner potentially before you see them. And their sense of what is happening at this moment is sort of expanded in that way. So wow, if their sense of

time is different than our sense of time, that really transforms that, you know, the dog who I think is like cooperatively sitting next to me on the couch and sort of doing the same thing that I'm doing. And then, you know, follow their nose anywhere and you're going to see something, you're going to notice something different. I did write a book about smell called Being a Dog, which I feel like your podcast stole, maybe. All right. Being a human, being a dog. Yep, that's our dog spinoff. That's only available to dogs. One of the things I did for that book was followed my dog's nose. And so where they sniffed, I sniffed. And I have to say, if you do want, if you do want to laugh, follow your dog's nose to where they're sniffing on the street. Other people

will laugh at you. You're getting a laugh because you're down on the tree guard and like trying to smell whatever they're so super interested in. And I can't always smell what they're smelling, right? Or I don't know how to interpret it. Sometimes my nose isn't good enough to notice anything. And sometimes there's a smell. And I'm like, that's a smell, but I don't know what it is. But boy, you realize that the whole like walk that we're taking together is transformed by thinking about them as smelling creatures, not just seeing creatures. So yeah, that was a big moment for me personally and in my work. Two ways that you've suggested that people could shift their own perspective of the world, but also understand their dog better, are one, to experiment with leading your own life, first for a little bit of time, but also then to just get down at the level they are, to see that

even the visual world is very different from the height of a dog than it is from our height. Same thing with children, frankly, right? And I, in that book On Looking, I walked with a doctor, Bennett Lorber who told me that as when he was a child, his dad just take him around to museums and sort of oblige him to pay attention by coming into a room, having them look, and then asking them to like leave the room and draw what was in the room. So kind of high stakes. But at some point, they also realized that he also realized that his sons weren't seeing what he was seeing when they looked up at paintings because he got down to their level and he looked up at the painting that he was asking them to look at. And because of the way the lights are situated and the glass protecting the artwork, kids like sometimes can't see the art on the walls.

It's just like a big blinding reflection to them. So suddenly you realize this thing that you're asking them to gaze at for hours for edification in the museum is just like a bright light for them. And they don't see Picasso at all. And it's so transformative just to be at the altitude of someone else and see like what the world looks like to them. So little tiny things lead to a pretty big effect. And I'm not trying to get up onto a big preachy soapbox here. But I will say that I think that one of the reasons why this is so important for ourselves, right, is to, you can break you out of the very egocentric thinking and it can help you see the world differently. But I think one of the reasons it's also so important as a society is that when we understand that other people and other animals don't experience the world exactly the same way we experience it, I think that's just a.

fundamental building block of empathy and of care for others. Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes dogs are like a great ambassador for like thinking about other perspectives in that, in that respect. They're sort of unwitting ambassadors. Well, thinking about dogs as ambassadors, one other experience that I wanted to ask you about is a lot of people don't know their neighbors very well. They don't know the people in their neighborhood.

And then they start walking a dog and everybody knows. the dog, right? Even if you are, if people don't know you, they're probably like, oh, that's Quiddity's owner. Yeah. Hey. Yeah. Right. It's a great, it's a great social lubricant to be out there with the dog because people will talk about the dog or they'll talk to the dog. Right. And then suddenly you're at the end of the leash and they're sort of by Fiat. They're also talking to you and because you're talking for the dog. And and then you suddenly have made a social connection, which feels really nice. Absolutely. They're facilitators in that way. God, they're great dogs.

Aren't they great? They're great. It's funny because I have never owned a dog and I don't own a dog currently. Although I actually wonder, is that as one of the leading dog experts in the world, how do you feel about the phrase owned a dog? Is that do you live with a dog or do you own a dog? It describes the legal relationship we have with dogs. Okay, okay. Yeah, but I consider the dogs I live with, who I say I live with, I guess, I consider me to be their person, right?

They're sort of my dogs and I'm their person. So I don't really, I use owner for convenience. Yes. Some people say guardian or parents. And all of those seem wrong. I'm just the person in the family and they're the dog in the family. There's also a very famous Seinfeld joke, of course, about dogs, which is, you know, that if aliens came down to Earth and they saw two species and one species was walking along behind the other one and picking up its poop and then giving them food and treats, which species would you think was in charge on Earth? It wouldn't be the humans.

Yeah, carrying their poop around a little bag is kind of an amazing, humbling part of living with dogs in a city. But, you know, on the other hand, I very much think about, now that I'm really noticing everything about my dog's life, how captive they are to us. Right? Like we control when they can go outside to poop. How amazing. If somebody was like, you know what, Chris, nope, you're going to stay in that room for, you know, definitely long. And then you'll be able to go out somewhere in the street, well, we'll let you defecate. You are almost to almost exactly describing my experience as an elementary school teacher,

which is you will stay in this room and we will dictate when you can poop and it is not when you need to. It is at the time that you can receive coverage. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess there's a lot in common there. How do our emotions affect the long-term behavior of our dogs? For example, like if someone has anxiety. Did those emotions transfer to the dogs in a way that might make the dog more anxious? Yeah, there is a little research on this that I could speak to where it looks like in some cases, this was a study of people who were doing agility training with their dogs. So it's like a kind of sport that people and dogs do together where the dog, maybe you've

seen agility. Very fun to watch. Perform. It's super fun to watch. My favorite part, though, is actually before the dogs get out there when the people practice going around a set of obstacles pretending to like guide the ghost dogs into the through the circuit. In that relationship, even though the dog isn't being handled by the person, like they're not even on a leash or anything, the person that they're following the person to sort of know how to go through the root of obstacles and ramps and tunnels and so forth. And there was good evidence in this study that when, with at least male handlers, when they got really stressed, their dogs also got really stressed. So that local emotional state was sort of contagious for the dogs.

And then there's since been a lot of research about, for instance, dogs' distinction of the smell of stress and happiness in people. So they, we like are giving out smell all the time. And that's another thing that thinking about smell has brought to me is realizing like a worse smell sources in an interesting way, like that we should come to terms with a little bit as human beings. And dogs are noticing our emotional changes via our smell. So stress has a smell. Apparently, like happiness has a smell. I don't know if it's a smell of happiness or some sort of affiliated smell, but dogs can distinguish them. So, and it also looks like there might be some contagious.

of those emotions. So if you come at them with a happy smell, they're more likely to respond with happiness. If you come at them with a stress or anxiety smell, they're more likely to be stressed or anxious themselves. And is that why, like, for someone like me, I am not super comfortable around dogs often. I mean, especially big dogs, little dogs I'm fine with.

But often if I'm meeting a big dog for the first time, I am stressed. I'm not sure how it's going to go. and I do find that often tends to make it not go super well. Like the dog is also nervous. Well, yeah, you smell stressed, you know. And it's also body, you know, what you're doing behaviorally. So if you're approaching a dog you're uncertain about, you look completely different than someone who's excited to see a new dog, right?

Like think about just how you stand, how you move. And you might not be noticing it, but like I'd love to see that videotape, right? And we'd be able to characterize, like, here's how you, like, react stiffly or move away or, and then you, the cortisol that you're experiencing the sort of stress reaction. All of that is telling the dog like, nah, like, we've got to target there. That doesn't mean the dog's going to react to that by attacking you. But it just means you're visible in those ways. Your stress or anxiety is visible to the dog. But then with dogs that are more playful, it takes me a little.

while to understand and to read the play signals to see like that's a safe play signal versus a dangerous play signal. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Since I started studying dogs via play, that was what I was looking at specifically. And they do have a bunch of play signals and you have to learn them, right? There's no, and dogs have to learn them. They don't come out, you know, as puppies just play bowing in front of other dogs right away.

They learn them. And when they do start playing without. doing a play signal and saying like I'm going to play, then it sort of reads like an attack. And the dogs will react to them as though they've just been attacked instead of in play. And that's like our play. You know, if you, if I wanted to play with my son, well, he's 16, so we don't do as much like rough and tumble play anymore. But if I wanted to, like, I could tackle him, but I have to like tell him.

Like we're playing now first. Otherwise, I just tackled him, right? You also did tell me before we spoke that your son is quite a successful and strong power lifter. So if you tackled him out of nowhere, he might also like throw you through the ceiling. I'm a big shovel. There's going to be a hole in the roof where you were launched into the sky. Yeah, that's like not a joke, actually, because he did come up and give me a big hug the other day and like bruise my room. Oh, yeah.

That's a strong boy. Well, you know, something that I'm curious about is in your home, you have, you know, you have a 16-year-old son, you have a husband, you have two dogs, you have a household full of people. And then you also have this research lab where you're studying these things in a more controlled setting. How do you take the lessons that you learn in the lab and apply them in your own life? How do you apply those lessons in your home? Sometimes it's what's happening at home that gives me ideas for my lab. Oh, tell me about that. Right. So it actually feeds back pretty nicely. So if I'm wondering, sometimes I'll see a behavior that someone's doing and think, I don't know the purpose of that. Just like all those owner questions, like, why do they, why are they shaking off? What does that mean? You know, you shake off if you're wet, but also dogs who have this, like, brilliant ability to, like, move their skin independently of their, like, frame, right? So they can, like, do those crazy shakes. Why do they do that? So I took this to the lab. We studied shaking behavior.

and like why it, where it appeared in normal social interactions. And we found that it appeared like when dogs were changing what they were doing. So if they're going from play to like walking or going from walking to like chasing or something like that, when they were at a switch or getting up from the being sitting down and going over to like sniff that other dog, they would shake as they were changing. It just allows me to see a little bit more. It's not like I change. my behavior with them that much, but allows me, like, even further entree into their, like,

Umfelds, right, their worldview. But with dogs, a lot of behavior is viewed as misbehavior. So you want your dog to, like, be calm when guests come over, but they're not calm. They're, like, jumping up on the guests and licking and barking. People get very frustrated all the time, because they're misbehaving. And you think, okay, but what's happening for the dog there? Right. Like there's someone new coming in the house exciting. So what do you do when you're exciting? You tell everyone, right? You're barking. Also, we smell amazing, especially from our mouth. Like whatever we have eaten is like coming out all the time. So they're like, let me find out who that is and what they ate. And our mouths are way up here and they're way down here. So that's how they get up there. So then you think all those behaviors make a lot of sense. If you just get into their perspective, it's not misbehavior. It's like good dog behavior. And if I don't want my dog to do that, I have to create a whole context that will allow them to be themselves and not like be rude. And same for my, you know, son. I have to, I can look at his behavior as rude or whatever it is, whatever teenage

behavior could be thought of his being. Or I can try to get into his head and say, well, what is it like to be this person who's like body is literally expanding overnight? Right? And who's in this like really fraught and interesting social life with other teenagers. And how would I react when my parents say this? Right. So that perspective it taking is always a good exercise at home. I love it. What is a little experiment that anyone who is listening and has a dog or has access to a friend's dog? What should they run to just see their dog or the world a little bit differently? What's a little experiment that they should run on their own? Oh, nice. Well, something that we were sort of thinking about recently in the lab, just to, like, see how well they can smell things. You could just create a little scent scavenger hunt or a scent, like, trail. Take a little bit of kibble or, like, one treat and, like, run a trail down your hallway and hide a treat. And see if your dog, if you point out where the trail starts with your friend, get them interested in smelling.

see if they can follow that invisible trail of like the tiniest micrograms of treat that you can't smell anymore to where the treat is hidden. And I bet that you start rethinking about how all the smells of you through the space you share with your dog and all the things you bring into the space that have smells might be meaningful for them. That's so fun. I love that. And let us know how that went. I'm very curious to hear if you want.

want to send in a video or just send an email and let us know what happened. I would love to hear the anecdotes about how your dog's sent scavenger hunt went. Alexandra, thank you so much for being on the show. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. And I just am such a fan. It is always a pleasure, Chris. I'm just delighted. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to Alexander Horowitz. She is the author of, among other books, Inside of a Dog, On Looking, and the Year of the I'm not going to be. Alexandra runs the dog cognition lab at Barnard.

I am your host, Chris Duffy, and this episode is part of a month-long series on How to Laugh More that is inspired by my new nonfiction book, Humor Me, which just came out and you can order now. You can find more about me and about humor me, my book at chris stuffycom. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of very good doggos. On the TED side, we've got the house-trained and well-behaved Daniela Ballereseau, Ben Ben-Ban-Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bo Hanini, Laini Lai, Tanzica-Sung-Manyibong,

Antonio Leigh, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by Matthias Salas, who gets a treat every time an episode doesn't contain factual errors. On the PRX side, we've got Leaders of the Pack and Best in Show winners, Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And thanks to you for listening. You are a good listener.

Yes, you are such a good listener. Please share this episode with anyone you think would like it. who loves a dog, acts like a dog, or you just want to sniff the world with. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care, and thanks for listening.