Instant Genius - Inside the mind of a dog, with Prof Alexandra Horowitz

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

In this episode we speak to Alexandra Horowitz, professor of canine cognition at Barnard College, Columbia University and author of Inside of a Dog – What Dogs, See, Smell and Know. She tells us what your dog is trying to tell you when they stare at you, what causes them to tilt their heads from side to side and why so many of them seem to like rolling in poo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Is anyone lucky enough to have a dog in their lives might tell you, sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what's going on in your pet pooch's mind. In this episode, we speak to Alexandra Horowitz, Professor of K-9 Cognition at Barnard College,

Columbia University, and author of Inside of a Dog, What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. She tells us what your dog's trying to tell you when they stare at you, what causes them to tilt their heads from side to side, and why so many of them seem to like rolling in poo. So in this episode, we're talking about dog behaviour, which is the the topic of your research. First off, I bet a lot of listeners will be thinking that you must have one of the best jobs in the world. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got into it? Yeah, I do have one of the best jobs in the world. That's accurate. I'm a dog cognition researcher. A job which frankly didn't exist two decades ago when I started studying dog behavior.

What I do is try to look at dog behavior in their natural environment, you know, interacting with dogs or other people or in a laboratory setting where I can control a little bit of what they do and ask them to make choices in simple tasks and then try to infer what that means they know or understand or feel or believe or consents. So I'm basically trying to get at their mind through looking at behavior. So then what does you sort of, I guess there's no such thing as a typical day in this sort of job. But could you give us an example of sort of what a day might look like? I have a dog cognition lab at Barnard College in New York City, and my researchers and I spend each academic year brainstorming the types of studies we want to develop,

sometimes based on questions that people who live with dogs have, sort of ordinary dog owner questions that we're saying maybe we can bring some science to. So we might spend part of the day brainstorming about ideas and starting to talk about methodologies that might test those ideas. Often in the evenings is when we run our studies because we're asking often owners to come to the lab with their dogs. So after work hours, they come to our lab and we run them through the couple of experimental designs that we've developed sometime earlier in the year to test these questions. So, I mean, the saddest part of my research really is that although I'm thinking about dogs and I'm seeing dogs every day, I'm not playing with dogs, right?

I'm not even touching the dogs. We have to be really aloof and standoffish because otherwise, if you're in a room with a dog and they're anything like the average dog, they're going to be way more interested in the people in the room than any kind of experimental stimuli that I set out for them. So we have to kind of be a little bit obnoxious and avoid interacting with them until the end of the study. So presumably, I guess a good chunk of your work

is on about based on studying how intelligent dogs are. So what do we know about that? You know, how intelligent are dogs compared to other, because you often hear people saying, oh, you know, a poodle is as intelligent as a four-year-old human or things like that. Is there any truth to that? It's such a ponderous question. Ultimately, I think I and most researchers who study non-human animals will say that there's no way to say there's one intelligence. that we can compare across species, frankly. So in some ways, dogs behave like four-year-olds.

In some ways, poodles are smarter than other breeds of dogs. But in other ways, they're not. So, for instance, border collies are often thought to be very smart dogs. And in fact, some of the dogs who are renowned for learning a lot of names of words for things like Chaser or Rico in Germany were border collies. So people say, oh, well, border collies are smart. Well, it's smart if what you count as smart is learning a lot of human words. But if what you want in a companion dog is a dog who will rest by your feet and sleep all day until you're ready to take them out and then

cooperatively walk by your side, interact in a friendly way with people and other dogs, maybe a Labrador retriever is much smarter than the border collie who races off. and tries to herd all the other dogs and people in their environment, right? And so they become a kind of difficult dog. They don't have a lot of social intelligence in the same way. So there's no way to compare like one intelligence factor across species. So what's your opinion on pedigree or purebred dogs then? Does breeding affect their behavior and their personalities?

Yeah, absolutely breeding affects their behavior. but not always in a reliable way. So there are some dogs who have been bred for function and continue to be bred for function, some of these working dogs. If a working dog is bred for a function, that means they have a tendency to do a type of behavior. So the border collie has an urge to work,

and they also have a propensity to notice the motion of things across the environment, like along the horizon, and to want to shepherd them back. Unless they're trained or encouraged to do this, they won't do it beautifully naturally, but they have the tendency to want to do that. So they'll do that in any context. Their behavior is determined by their breeding.

Some of the pedigree breeding, though, is really about looks. And we've created the pug and the bulldog to look in a way that's fashionable or appealing to us. behaviors don't necessarily come along with that. So over the last couple hundred years, the type of breeding that we've done has been less about behavior and personality, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

The research such looks at personality across breeds, for instance, finds that there's as much variability within the breed as between breeds. So another thing that often comes up when we're talking about the behavior of dogs is the notion that they're pack animals, that they belong to packs and they like to function in a pack. So how does the notion of belonging to a pack fit into how a dog behaves? Because dogs and wolves share a common ancestor, which would have been a wolf-like creature, and we know that wolves live in packs, it makes sense to some extent to talk about dogs as being social pack animals. they are distant from those ancient wolf ancestors by 20,000 years at least.

So it's not as though they have the same behavior, identical pack behavior, as we see in current wolves. But I think the most important thing is to realize what those packs are. And for wolves, as well as for dogs, packs are really families. So what it means is that they like to live with social others. They like to be around others and they'll treat those others as members of their family. So that's what makes dogs, part of what makes dogs able to cooperatively slip into human families is that they have a tendency to want to be near others and treat them familiarly. So what do you know then about how dogs perceive the world, you know, how they use their senses?

This is really my main point of interest with dogs, although I started out studying. their cognition, the part of cognition I got interested in is what it means to be a smelling creature, for instance. If we think about ourselves, we have perfectly good senses of smell as humans, but we're mostly visual creatures. We think about the world as we see it, and then smells and sounds kind of come along and complete, make a fuller picture of the world, but we think about it visually for the most part. And dogs are primarily olfactory, like lots of other mammals. And so they must think about the world in smells. I think this, the question of what do they perceive is like a huge question, a huge research question. And some of the types of things that I

think about are the way that smells move differently through the space in a day. So just when you open your eyes in the morning and the world just appears in front of you, visually, we assume it's like that for everybody. But for dogs who have decent vision but are smelling the world first, they're going to notice smells that are kind of wafting in the door on a breeze or through the window or they're going to be interested in smells that have fallen on the floor and investigating smells from yesterday, basically, or someone who's gone by before. So their whole thinking about the world is going to be redefined by their smell. And I think we're only beginning to find out how.

Yeah, that sounds like a real challenge. I was just going to say, how do you go about studying that? There are olfactory neuroscientists and psychologists who essentially approach studying smell, the way we would approach studying vision, if we didn't know much about it. You just present them with different smells,

different thresholds of smells, different combinations of odors, and see what their reaction is. Can they notice differences between two different odors? for instance. If so, we know they have the acuity to do that. We've done some more naturalistic studies too, where basically we've seen if, for instance, dogs will distinguish the smell of their owner from the smell of a stranger, absent the owner and stranger being in the room, right? The smell just left on a t-shirt that the person has worn overnight. And they can distinguish them, right? So it's by giving them odorant, things and creating experimental situations so that you can start to understand the types of things they care about and the types of things they can notice. So what do we know then about how dogs perceive as humans and how they understand us and relate

to us? Well, absolutely, they can detect and identify us by smell. But a lot of the research in dog cognition has had to do with whether they can, for instance, recognize visual components of us like an emotional expression on our face. And there has been a lot of research that shows that they, for instance, distinguish a happy from an angry or sad face, which is kind of extraordinary, given that they don't make these kinds of expressions themselves. So they don't need to know how to recognize them in each other, but they are attuned to these differences in our faces. And more broadly, they know lots of other types of things about

us. I mean, I think about them as anthropologists in our houses because they're basically sitting and watching us all day. They learn our habits. They know the difference between when you're getting up from your desk to go to the fridge or to take them for a walk. And that's because they're very good readers of behavior and they're very good observers of us. So they do wind up knowing quite a bit about us. So what do we know about dog vocalizations? I used to have a German Shepherd. And, I mean, maybe I'm mad, but I'm sure he used to do a specific bark if he wanted to go out onto the yard to use the bathroom.

I mean, am I bonkers? No, not at all. I'm sure that he was giving you a specific bark. They have distinguishable barks. I mean, the research so far has distinguished about eight different types of barks with different meaning. Barks probably evolved, by the way, in dogs to communicate with humans, even though. We see them as kind of noisy sounds that don't have meaning.

They're just in the range of human speech. And wolves don't typically bark. So dogs probably started like talking to us through these barks. And so there are different barks for, you know, dogs who are by themselves, like an alone bark, a solitary bark, versus a dog who wants to play versus a dog who wants to go outside. Dogs who practice this sport called Schutzund. There's a bark for that.

they are saying things with their barks and then of course they have whole ranges of other vocalizations from growls to howling to sort of meows almost and squeals and yelps. We tend to see them not as meaningful but I think that's our oversight. So perhaps then that's the dog trying to express a desire to do something. How about emotions? You know, a lot of people were say that, you know, that they notice that their dog displays signs anyway of feeling emotions. What do we know about that? Oh, certainly dogs have emotions. And some of those barks are representative of them, right?

A Yelp is a representative surprise or pain and an alone bark is probably, while not expressing an emotion per se, is vocalization indicating a kind of loneliness or absence of company. So those vocalizations are expressing emotions, and we have every reason to believe based on their brain anatomy that they have the same kinds of basic emotions that we do. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com

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and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So another sort of anecdote from my dog that I used to have. Once on Easter, we had some chocolate eggs in a bowl on the table and went shopping or something. Came back and noticed that they were missing. So I thought, where have they gone?

It's probably the dog. So I found that there was probably half a dozen eggs and he'd eaten one and then hidden five under his blanket. And so I was wondering, like, was he making a plan? You know, I'll save those eggs for later. Is that possible? Can they make plans like that? Yeah, absolutely. So he was doing something both clever and not clever because, of course, chocolate is toxic for dogs.

So some large amount of it would probably make him quite ill. and maybe I would hesitate to say. So we just took a little bit and saved it for later. But certainly the idea of stashing food for leaner times is something that many of them have inherited from their wolf ancestors who, if they take down a large animal, for instance, might not consume it all at once, even among members of the pack. And so they'll cash some of it for a time when they don't have something to eat. And so a lot of people will see this in dogs burying a treat they're given or a toy. It's kind of a vestigial impulse. Are they thinking consciously? Boy, I want to save this for some other time. We don't know. I don't know. They might be. We have no reason to assume that they're not just because we don't know in what form that thinking would take. But yes, it does seem to be thinking about a future time and planning for that. So let's have a look at some sort of specific common behaviors that I had a look on the internet and looked at the biggest, most popularly searched questions.

I just wondered if we could run through a few of those. Sure. So top of the list is, why does my dog stare at me? What I love about questions from people who live with dogs, first of all, is that they're never the questions that science asks per se, right? but we could probably come up with an answer via some of our studies. A lot of them are about, why is, what does my dog know about me, right? Why do they have some insight into me or what are they doing vis-a-vis me, which I find interesting?

Why does my dog stare at me? Well, hey, you control their world, right? I mean, dogs are, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but captive to us for the most part, owned dogs, where we designate when they eat. We designate when they can go out and socialize and sniff the world. We designate when they can urinate and defecate. So we're in control of all of these things that they want to do. They want to see when that's going to happen.

The other component of the stair is that is something that's actually one of the first discoveries in dog cognition research that led to a lot of future research with dogs, which is that dogs will look us in the eyes, look at our face. in a way that's very unusual of non-human animals. It's not that there's no other animal who will look at in the eyes, but most animals will use staring at someone else as a kind of threat display. Wolves will, for instance, that's a way to stare down an unknown wolf and maybe avoid a conflict. We use, humans use, gazing at each other as potentially an intimate gesture. or something you do with people you're friendly with or you're intimate with. And it's also part of communication.

You get somebody's attention or you, by looking at them and you hold gaze sometimes during communication. So we find it very appealing. And somewhere along the way, we either selected for dogs or dogs selected themselves in some way for dogs who would look us in the face. We find that indicates often that they kind of are interested in us and that they under understand us. But at minimum, they're looking for information from us, and they know that our faces are the source of a lot of that information. So the second sort of most popular one that I think most people will be familiar with, possibly a little bit related, is what's going on when a dog tilts its head from side to side? There has actually been a little bit of research on this, right?

And it winds up being as kind of popularly understood. Sometimes there's a situation that's puzzling, and they're either trying to get kind of a different angle on it, right, or to hear a little better what's happening, or just waiting for the next bit of information to arrive to them so that they can discern what's happening. And I think the part that is complementary is that we find it endearing, So we probably actually encourage that kind of behavior.

And then they do it just for the sake of getting the positive feedback from us. And another one coming on the internet. I'm sure people have seen lots of short video clips of this. It's something called the Zoomis. So has that been researched at all? Do we know what? The Zumi is delightful to watch. Yeah, it hasn't been researched.

There are some decent hypotheses about it, you know, which have to do with having X-Sexamines. energy, right? You're not going to see the zoomies often on a dog who's been a working dog all day, hurting sheep or what have you. They don't do the zoomies. It's more dogs who've maybe been cooped up all day and then get outside and it seems to be an expression of delight. But those are just hypotheses, I think, good ones, but they haven't been studied. Another popular topic on the internet is, I think this, did they call it dog shaming? You know, when your dog wrecks something in your house, and they take a photo of it and it looks like it's guilty or sorry or something. Do we know

anything about that? Yeah, in fact, I have studied what I call the guilty look, right? Which is, as most people who live with dogs recognize, a dog who looks guilty of some infraction, and maybe their ears are back or their head is down or they're looking a little bit away or their tail is wagging low between their legs. I feel very sad about the dog shaming images because we did the study on the guilty look to see if that look came up more often when they'd done something that they could potentially even feel guilty about. Like in our case, eating a treat that they were told not to eat in the owner's absence. And what I basically found, though, is that they show the same amount of guilty look, whether they ate the treat or not, what changed the rate of this

look was if the owners thought they had eaten it and come to kind of scold them, however, mildly. Basically, it's a response to our behavior that we look like we're about to get angry or upset or even to punish them. And they put on this look, which is a kind of submissive look, an appeasement look, saying, like, please don't, like, I'm sorry. Whatever it is, I'm sorry. But they don't, they do it even if we just give them the kind of angry face. but they haven't done anything wrong, which is a real sign that it's not because they're feeling guilty. Now, this doesn't mean they can't feel guilty. It's just that we're not really great at reading that behavior. It's much more of a submissive look directed to us than an expression

of their own internal strife at having broken a rule. Another common question that came up was paw licking. A lot of people are researching, you know, what's going on when my dog's licking their paws a lot? This is probably a veterinary question more than it is a cognition question. A lot of dog behavior is, you know, we view all dog behavior as somehow wildly meaningful, whereas it's not necessarily, right? If I just sort of move my hands, somebody says, oh, why does she move her hands that way? I mean, just some behavior is just sort of spurious behavior. Paw licking isn't a sign of anything per se, but it could be a sign of, if some irritation or infection in the paws, it's something I would ask my veterinarian about

if it was happening to a point where they were actually taking hair off of their paws. But there's nothing cognitive about it, right? They're not trying to communicate anything through that behavior. And another really common question that people say, and that is related to dog's perception of us, is that they can sense our fear. I think this is a really common one. I mean, is there any truth in that?

There is some truth in that. There are good reasons to believe that they could sense our fear. One is that they are, as I've said, really great readers of our behavior. And they start to learn the difference between someone who's going to be a friendly person and someone who's going to be an angry person, right? And similarly, somebody who is fearful has very different body language as any good human observer of behavior, of human behavior will also recognize. you might notice when someone looks shocked or scared just from their behavior.

So they notice that. But in addition, there is a smell that we might give off based on like a raised level of cortisol, which is detectable by dogs. And there has been one study that demonstrated that dogs were able to distinguish fearful from not fearful smelling people in an experimental paradigm. So I think there is some truth to that. What there isn't truth to is that once they see fear, they're going to take advantage of it, right, and try to harm that person or something.

It just means that they're much more sensitive to what we're giving off than we think. So how about the sort of the age-old one, which is the relationship between dogs and cats? So I know my dog, he was really well-behaved. You wouldn't need to walk him on a lead. But the moment he saw a cat, the fur on his back would stick up And, you know, it was really uncharacteristic for him to behave like that. Well, we think about dogs and cats as sort of in the same breath because they're both companion animals to us.

They're both domesticated. I mean, some people think about cats as not really fully domesticated. But all right, they've been at least in our homes. We treat them as pets. But to a dog, a cat is not another pet. They are potentially a prey animal, right? I mean, dogs were as wolves, carnivores. and still omnivorous, certainly.

Many still have a very instinctive drive to chase small running things. And so a cat is that to them. So would a squirrel be, right? So would a rat be? And so they're not viewing the cat as distinguishable from those other animals that we might not be at all surprised that they chase. So this is kind of an icky one, but it's something that a lot of people ask is,

why do so many dogs seem to like to roll in poo? Yeah, that question I get a lot as well. And we don't really know this either. There are some good hypotheses about this as well. Either they're trying, they enjoy the smell, right? They don't mind the smell. Some dogs eat feces of other dogs or of other species. It actually has nutritional content.

So it's not necessarily a negative behavior. If you're a wild animal, it's just that in our environment, we don't find that to be health giving. So they find the smell not off-putting, right? And either they're trying to perfume themselves with it, right, and bring it back and share that with members of their family pack, or they just enjoy wearing it themselves for their own sake, right? I like the smell. I'm going to cover myself with this smell. That's something that humans do all the time.

and it doesn't have to have an evolutionary basis. But it hasn't been experimentally investigated. So just one more from the internet then is also about licking. So what's a dog trying to express when they lick a human? We tend to view licking, especially around our faces, as in fact it's sometimes called kissing behavior, right? We assume that that's like a gesture of affection. And there might be something affectionate in it.

they'll distinguish people of whom they'll try to kiss. But if we do go back to wolf behavior, there is another reason to lick around the face of a person. And it is that in wolves in these family packs, maybe a few members of the pack go off and hunt an animal and consume some of that animal's flesh and then return to the pack, and the remaining members of that pack

will greet the returning hunters by licking around their face. It is this sort of greeting, but also it prompts them to regurgitate some of that food. So the result is that they're sharing the food that they've hunted with the remaining members of the pack, often younger members of the pack. So it's possible that dogs have this sort of vestigial urge

to lick us around the face as a way to get us to share some of our sandwich with them. So just by way of finishing up then, is there anything we can do to help understand our dogs better? As I've said, they're such good observers of us, but sometimes we don't spend as much time observing them, right? We kind of give peremptory analyses of what they're doing. As soon as you get a dog, you think, oh, this is what he wants. People start talking about what he's feeling or the grudge he's holding or what he likes or doesn't like. And as a matter of fact, if we just hold off on assuming we know about dogs and instead just look very closely at their behavior,

they're always telling us a lot. So I think that's a good thing to start as and recognize that they're, you know, another species among us and exist in this period of not knowing. And I also think that recognizing that smell is primary for them is really important and letting them sniff. They use it socially. it's really important to let them sniff other dogs and let them sniff the world and let them sniff you. Like, that's how they see. So to not let them do that is, I think, to rob them of just a great pleasure and enjoyment and also participation in the world. That was Alexandra Horowitz, professor of canine cognition at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Inside of a Dog, What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. The current issue of BBC Science Focus is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download a digital copy from your preferred app store.

You can of course also find us online at ScienceFocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameadio.com.

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