The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans by Jessica Pierce, Marc Bekoff

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

A Dog's World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans by Jessica Pierce, Marc Bekoff From two of the world’s leading authorities on dogs, an imaginative journey into a future of dogs without people What would happen to dogs if humans simply disappeared? Would dogs be able to survive on their own without us? A Dog’s World imagines a posthuman future for dogs, revealing how dogs would survive―and possibly even thrive―and explaining how this new and revolutionary perspective can guide how we interact with dogs now. Drawing on biology, ecology, and the latest findings on the lives and behavior of dogs and their wild relatives, Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff―two of today’s most innovative thinkers about dogs―explore who dogs might become without direct human intervention into breeding, arranged playdates at the dog park, regular feedings, and veterinary care. Pierce and Bekoff show how dogs are quick learners who are highly adaptable and opportunistic, and they offer compelling evidence that dogs already do survive on their own―and could do so in a world without us. Challenging the notion that dogs would be helpless without their human counterparts, A Dog’s World enables us to understand these independent and remarkably intelligent animals on their own terms.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're cutting you in the Nugget Podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. As always, go subscribe to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Also, go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram.

All those are cool places the kids are playing. Watch for upcoming coverage of CES Show, the Consumer Electronics Show, whatever it's called. You know what it's about. It's coming up next week. It's going to be an adventure. Not only am I going to interview, I think we've got 30 appointments or something. We're going to be interviewing people live at the booth. We're going to be talking to people.

It's going to be a really interesting show. But also, I'll be dodging the Omicron virus. So you get to see me then. I think I'll be wearing a hazmat suit to the show. So it'll be interesting. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. She's written a lot of books. She is the author of a new book that came out October 26, 2021 called A Dog's World,

Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans. Jessica Pierce is going to be with us on the show. She's going to be talking about her beautiful book and some of the aspects of what she put into it. She is a bioethicist. She's one of the world's foremost scholars in environmental bioethics and animal ethics. Because, you know, my dogs do need to learn some ethics. I think it's an antithetical to eat your own poop. I don't know. Her books explore various facets of the human-animal relationship with a particular focus on ethics of living well with companion animals.

Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Scientific American. She writes a regular blog for Psychology Today called All Dogs Go to Heaven. Excuse me. Jessica is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz. I can't remember if I got that right or not. Medical school. And

welcome to the show. Jessica, did I get that last word right again? You did. And thank you, Chris, for having me. It's nice to be here. Thank you. I had to pause for a second because I was thinking about some of my dogs that have passed on. And, you know, when I said, all dogs go to heaven, it kind of put me in a place there. But welcome to the show, Jessica. Congratulations on the new book.

It's wonderful to have you. Thank you. It's nice to be here. There you go. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and get to know more about you. All right. So my plug is particularly about this book is that it's a thought experiment about what would happen to dogs in a world without us. I think it's a really interesting book. I learned the most from writing this book than I have from any other book that I've worked on and really had my

thinking about dogs warped and altered in significant ways. So I think my plug is, I think it's fascinating thought experiment. I'm not sure other people in the world think it's a fascinating thought experiment, but go there, check it out, think about it. My dogs and they were horrified. They're like, you're the treat person. Where would we be without the treat person? See, my dog, she had mixed feelings about it. She thought I'd have a lot more opportunity just to do whatever the heck I want without you looking over my shoulder saying, oh, stop that.

Yeah, you could chew on everything and just go wherever you want to go. And like you said, eat poop whenever you want to. There you go. Give us your dot com so people and just go wherever you want to go. And like you said, eat poop whenever you want to. There you go. Give us your.com so that people can find you on the internet. Okay. Jessica Pierce.net. There you go. And so Jessica, you come up with this theory. And so the book is about imagining the lives of dogs in a world without humans that cheated and read your subtitle. Tell us, tell us a bit more about how that expands in the book. So, yeah, I can tell you a little bit about what motivated the book for me and Mark. This was our fourth book together.

And throughout the books that we've worked on and a couple of books that I've worked on myself, I've really thought hard and long about the question of what it means to live ethically with companion animals. And often when you think of animal ethics or like animal welfare and advocacy, you think of animals in agriculture or animals in labs, these animals who are really very obviously have welfare challenges. And you don't think about pets because you think they're pampered. They have these soft beds and they get a bowl of kibble every morning and every night, and they don't think about pets because you think they're pampered. They have these soft beds and they get a bowl of kibble every morning and every night and they don't really have to do anything. They have easy lives. And I have felt that's not necessarily the case. And the last book that Mark and I wrote together was called Unleashing Your Dog. And it was really about letting your dog be a dog. And one thing that was surprising to me was that it's actually a hard

question to answer. What does it mean to let a dog be a dog? That seems super obvious, but what does it mean to let a dog engage in natural doggy behaviors? And oddly enough, many of the things that we expect of our dogs who live as pets are unnatural. We're constantly training them not to be dogs or scolding them for being dogs. So this latest book was an exploration of what does it actually mean to be a dog and what does that look like in the absence of humans? Are dogs still dogs? Absolutely. And in fact, they maybe have more interesting lives

without us always in the background hovering around telling them not to do what they really want to do. I don't know. My dogs are really attached to me. It's dog treats. And they actually had this little game they were playing with me for a short while. I didn't have doggy doors installed yet. And so I'd have to bring them in through a two-door system and be like, from the garage, come in, and then down into the basement.

And I'd be like, come on in. And they would park at the top of the stairs and look at me and be like, we want treats if we're coming in. It's like a negotiation. And, and so I'd have to shake the treat bag that would give them, Oh, okay. The idiot's going to give us treats now. And then they come down. But if I didn't shake the treat bag, they just sit there. Yeah.

We're not working with you. Not doing it. Which doesn't work in winter. Cause that's like colder. But we did that for a while. And I just barely this week installed doggy doors. And now they're really pissed at me because they because they don't get bargaining power yeah you just you want to come in you want to leave i don't care do whatever but they still get lots of treats but it's funny that now they're just constantly hounding me going

they're really spoiled that that's how all dogs should be. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. They get chicken and everything. They're just, they have their own pet beds and yeah, it's pretty much out of control around here. So what are bioethics and stuff like that? How's that? Is that kind of what you draw on in the book? So give us a layman's term of how that works.

Yeah. So I'm not your typical bioethicist. That's the first thing I'll say. My, my training is in philosophy and theology, ethical theory. intersection of the medical system and the humanistic disciplines of philosophy and theology and law and so forth. And I switched into thinking about animals in the way I do when I had a dog. You were talking about this at the beginning. I had a dog who was nearing the end of life And I was having to make decisions about quality of life and prolonging life and euthanasia. And I'm like, you know, the issues that I'm facing with OD are exactly the

same issues that medical ethicists are dealing with in the healthcare system with patients who are nearing the end of life and family members who are facing these decisions. But there was just a lot less conversation about making these decisions and navigating this terrain with companion animals. It's definitely the terrain of a bioethicist, but typically people will focus on human issues and I'm more interested in human animal issues. I had that too experience. And I think a lot of people do when they're, when their dogs start getting sick and you're making those choices.

I had so many people that would come to me and be like, you just need to put them down. Just give up, put them down. And I'm just like, wow, I hope I'm not your relative when it comes. I know.

Isn't that funny? You would never say that about somebody. You never, you never just go to say, hey, my mom, she got a little COVID. Yeah, just put her down. Yeah. She's going to suffer. She looks uncomfortable.

Yeah. In fact, one of my dogs had a, she had this, I forget what it was called, but it was an infection that can grow between the organs and tissue. And penicillin won't get to it. And so what eventually happens, it eventually, it keeps expanding to a point it breaks out of the skin. And when it does, the air gets to it. And of course then you can treat it.

And that was all my dog had, but we knew it wasn't cancer and we just knew this thing was growing. And I'm like, can we just stab it? And're like no that could be worse especially with cancer and so we just had to wait for a week or two for this thing to pop out and i had people calling me saying put her down and she lived for another three years after that once we once it blew out it was done it was the weirdest thing ever but man i would have lost three years of gold, just pure gold. And I don't know. When it comes to my dogs and some human beings, I won't say which ones, maybe politicians or something. I don't know.

I'm just kidding. But there are some people that I think probably are better, higher humans on the put-down scale should be put down than dogs. That's just my opinion anyway. So give us some tips or some different prospects of the book and should we learn something from this? Like maybe we should let our dogs maybe run around and play more or do something more? So there are two questions that we address in the book. One is, would dogs survive without humans? And the answer to that is almost certainly yes. Most dogs would survive.

There would be a rough transition period, assuming there's some all-inclusive rapture and every human disappears tomorrow. Dogs rely, even dogs who don't live as pet dogs rely on us for human food resources in the form of garbage or handouts or feces. And so the transition would be rough. One thing that always surprises people when I say this, and it surprised me when I first heard it, is that of the billion or so dogs on the planet, which you can take a moment to let that sink in, that's a lot of dogs. That's a lot of dog poop scooping. That's a lot of the billion or so dogs on the planet. Only about 20% of those live as pets.

Oh, wow. So dogs are already living on their own. And one of the things that really irks me is when people say, oh, they need people. Dogs are our shadow and can't survive without our love and our companionship. And it's just not true. They can, and they do. And in many ways, they'd be better off, which is sad to think about. And then the other thing that we explored in the book, which really we give more attention to is what would happen to dogs over time? What would the evolutionary trajectory look like? And this is purely speculation, but what would they eat if dogs don't have kibble or human garbage? Would they hunt for

larger prey like deer, in which case they would have to form packs? Or would they eat little stuff? And would dogs, what would they look like? Right now there's extreme morphological diversity. In other words, there are extreme physical types. If you think of a multi-poo, little tiny two-pound dog versus an Irish wolfhound who wouldn't fit in the back of a huge SUV, would dogs become large or would they become tiny? Would it depend on the ecosystem that they're trying to survive in? What would happen to huskies in Phoenix? What would happen to chihuahuas in Juneau, Alaska? And so it's a speculation about what they would look like, what they would eat, how they would manage to reproduce without our help, which I think the answer to that pretty

happily. Yeah, I think they know how to do that. And then what would happen to their inner lives, their cognitive and emotional lives? There are some interesting things about dogs that are unique to dogs as the only domesticated canid that we share the planet with. For example, dogs have specialized facial musculature that allows them to very successfully solicit attention or beg for food. It's called puppy dog eyes. You've seen it. Your dogs probably give it to you every day when they're waiting for their treats that are not forthcoming enough. And what would happen to those traits that are, or behaviors that are specifically evolved for dogs to better

communicate with us, manipulate us, et cetera. Would they have any usefulness in a future without us? Maybe. And then I think ultimately like the ethical point of the book, which is of course, what's most interesting for me is what does this tell us about how we treat our dogs now and what can we do to help them, I guess you could say, discover their inner wild a little bit more. One example, very specific example, is just recognizing that dogs are olfactory creatures. We live, humans are visual creatures. So visual stimuli is really important to us, but for dogs, it's olfactory stimuli. So when you take your dog for a walk, for God's sake, let your dog sniff and let your dog sniff what your dog is interested in sniffing, not what you

think might be interesting to sniff, which is going to be really probably boring to your dog. And just give them the time and space to be a dog in as much as that's possible within this very constrained environment that we expect pet dogs to live in. So I'm being a bad dog owner if I don't let my dog do whatever she wants when she wants to go sniffing. Within reason, it's hard though, because it's illegal to let your dog be free as much as they would like to be in many places. You just, you can't have your dog off leash or you can, or you'll get a ticket or you'll get some irate other dog walker yelling at you. So it's really a balancing of what dogs need with what's possible,

given the constraints of our culture. Yeah. I have Huskies. You can't trust them off leash. No, no. And they are the kennel that we used to take our dog OD to. She would not take Huskies because they were so good at

escaping. Oh yeah, that's right. Any fence they could get out of and they're just, they want to be free. Yeah. Can't blame them. They're like me. That's why I stayed single all these years. I'll climb any fence to get away. So this is pretty interesting. I know that since I love Siberian huskies and I've had four of them now, and I know that they are, I think they're the closest thing to wolves or wild dogs, to my understanding. You're the professor, so I'll defer to you. They learned over time, they're like, hey, man,

we can get some pretty consistent stuff from these idiots over here, these human beings, rather than just wandering around the wild fighting over stuff. Let's work with these people because they're dumb and they're big, but they have treats. They have good food. Yeah. And they've done all the work to get it ready for us. Yeah. So I think your question's loaded. There are a couple of things in there. One is about these breeds of dog who are more wolf. And one of the questions that we get all the time about this book and which we thought about when we were writing is intuitively, it seems like the more wolf-like sort of ancient breeds might have a better shot at survival just because their physical

shape is intact sort of relative to the canid plan. And compared to, for example, I always pick on the snub-nosed dogs, but French bulldogs, I'm sorry, they're very cute, but they can't breathe very well. And that's going to be a problem in the future if humans aren't around to assist. And so I think the wolf-like breeds, it's quite possible that they would have an edge up on other types of dogs in the survival game. You guys are going to make it when the apocalypse hits, which is soon, evidently. One of the things that we do in the book that was entertaining for us was we talk about doomsday prepping for our dogs. There are two things, doomsday prepping for our dogs, assuming we're still around, stockpiling a lot of kibble, but doomsday prepping our dogs. There are two things, doomsday prepping for our dogs, assuming we're still around stockpiling a lot of kibble, but doomsday prepping our dogs. So if you knew you weren't going to be here in a year, would you start your dog on a physical exercise regimen and make your

dog go out and do some hunting on her own to hone her skills and get tough and make her stay out in the cold for a little while so that she would develop some, you know, resilience. Or do we just let them be pampered and hope for the best? I have this vision of apocalyptic vision of like roving bands of Pomeranians. Yeah, which is truly terrifying, honestly. And again, that's one of the things that really became clear in the book is you can't make any assumptions about who's going to survive. And Pomeranians might do quite well. Yeah, you never know. Because they're tenacious little creatures.

Yeah, they can get the small little animals and they're just little vicious. Grasshoppers. That'll just bark them to death. That's usually about die when I get around one. I don't know how people live with those things. I love dogs, but I don't like barky dogs. That's where the line gets drawn with me. But no, my Huskies, they're always out hunting.

My first Husky was a granddaughter of an Adidara racer from Alaska. And she was really purebred she had like her papers and everything and she loved to be out in the cold like the colder it would get the deeper the snow would get she the more she wouldn't come in and she was a hunter and she was obviously in her world pretty much that's how we our relationship was and but yeah I imagine some dogs would definitely have a hard time part of the all the inbreeding of how they made a lot of the, some of these things, like you said, the some of those bulldogs, I feel sorry for some of those dogs sometimes. Some people love them, but clearly, and some of them have higher genetic defects or cancer from the genetic defects

than other dogs or have different issues like hip dysplasia and stuff. Yeah. And that's, you know, what one the chapters in the book is called Gains and Losses. And we made a table of all the things that dogs have to gain and lose by humans disappearing. And perhaps not surprisingly, the gains column was much longer and more robust. And one of the things that dogs definitely have to gain by us disappearing is that there would no longer be this kind of insane breeding, deliberate breeding of dogs who have maladaptive traits, who suffer, not only may not be able to survive, but who suffer now every day, a diminished lifestyle. I know it makes people angry when I say that, but I do think that it's wrong to deliberately introduce

those traits or promote them when we have a choice not to. Yeah, they clearly can't breathe. I know I've probably lost the bulldog crowd here, but oh, it's a small thing. Yeah, I have some friends who they live next door to a couple who has a bulldog and the the dog can't go for walks more than 15 minutes they have a stroller for the dog um because the dog literally is not allowed to walk more than 15 minutes a day because of breathing difficulties and has had several surgeries already at a year old. And it's sad. That's not to say that any dog couldn't have issues like that.

I must admit that I have a stroller for my dog because she has a dislocated and she loves it. Yeah. My Huskies would never, no matter how bad off they got, would never. You might be surprised because I said that about Bella. She's a cranky dog who doesn't tolerate much of anything. But the trick was treats. The first time I got the stroller out, I put a ton of treats in there, and she jumped in. And she was a little freaked out, but then I just started feeding her treats and treats.

And now she actually goes in there even when we're not going for a walk. Just like, I'm going to get some free treats. I know that one thing that my dogs would love for me to be gone for is I'm always kicking them out of the bed or at least moving them when I go to bed. Because I'm like, get out of my way. This is my bed. And they're just like, no, it's our bed. We were here first. I'm like, no, it's my bed.

I'm big enough. I'll crush you. So you must move. But, yeah, they're just like no it's our bed we were here first i'm like no that's my bed i'm big enough i'll crush you so you must move but yeah they're never happy they're like hey man we've been here for hours man this is our bed this is we're always here but what are some other tidbits and aspects that you can tease out about the book let's see we've talked about doomsday prepping and we've talked about gains and losses i'm not doing doomsday prepping. If the world's going to hell, I'm sorry, man. I'm not taking them with me. No, but should you get them ready for it? I don't know. Maybe yours already.

We're all going out. And that's the thing. I guess it depends on the doomsday, right? It does. Although it seems like a pretty tenuous place right now. Yeah. So, yeah, we talked about morphology and feeding ecology. And, yeah, one of the phrases that I like from the book is imagining a world of dog possibilities.

And just that the human and dog relationship, even though it's wonderful. And I have a bond with my dog that's very special, but it's not a dog's purpose to be our pet necessarily. There are a lot of things, a lot of things that dogs can be even in the world now. And I used to think that feral and free ranging dogs were unfortunate because they didn't have a human home. And I really have changed my thinking about that. The main research base that we use for this book was the research on free ranging dogs, which is fascinating. And it's not something that dog owners typically read. And we read stuff on dog cognition and studies that were done in dog cognition labs, which are interesting too.

But it's really different to look at the behavior of free-ranging dogs. And just to take two little examples, one is the role of fathers in parenting. It's often said, oh, dogs, male dogs don't engage in parenting behavior. But that's not actually true. They don't engage in parenting behavior in captive settings because we don't let them. It's not set up. Breeding of dogs is not set up in such a way that fathers have any opportunity to participate. But in studies of free-ranging dogs, there is a role for fathers, at least in some studies.

Fathers will help get food. They'll help protect the babies. And not only fathers, but aunts and uncles and other what you would call in the scientific literature, alloparents. And I think that's pretty interesting. And another interesting tidbit from the research on feral and free-ranging dogs is home range size. A pet dog who has a little backyard is pretty lucky, but free-ranging dogs would have a home range anywhere from, you know, some are as small as half an acre. Some have a home range as large as 7,000 acres. So under naturalistic conditions, a dog would cover a lot of ground and it gives you an awareness of how tightly constrained their physical and social worlds are under our management.

Yeah. My huskies, when they would escape, they would be caught two or three miles away. Yeah. One time, Shadow the wolf, she was caught going down the freeway at 2 a.m. in the morning. Oh, wow. Going down the freeway. A guy pulled over, thankfully, and picked her up off the freeway at 2 a.m. in the morning. Oh, wow. Going down the freeway. Guy pulled over, thankfully, and picked her up off the freeway. But, yeah, she just, I don't know, she wanted an express lane.

So she was going somewhere fast. Yeah. Good. I'm glad she caught that. That's a husky for you. But, yeah, it's interesting to me. And maybe we should let our dogs. And maybe the lesson in the book is that we should let our dogs revel more and dog them and let them really enjoy their stuff.

I see a lot of people that take dogs for a walk. They're like, go pee and get down and barking at them and drag them back in the house. And it's, you know, that's a horrible interaction with your dog. Yeah, it's not very fun for the dog. Yeah, and even something as simple as walking, I've been trying to rethink the language even because dogs, so dogs are, canids are cursorial mammals, which means that they run. The walking pace is not preferred pace of the canid. Neither is walking in a straight line, which is what we do when we walk them on a leash. For dogs, that's pretty frustrating.

They want to zigzag around and go follow their noses and stop and start. And so finding ways to exercise them that let them engage in those more interesting forms of physical movement. It's something that's not too hard to do. I mean, you can, some people call it free choice walking and they'll actually, it's funny to watch, they'll follow their dog. I do that too. I'm sure I look ridiculous. If she wants to go that way, I go that way. And if she wants to stop, I stop. And if she wants to dart over there, she doesn't dart anymore because of her leg, but just let them choose for once. Yeah. We impose a lot of choices on them and just give them more agency.

One of my no's we're talking about, she's here licking my hand. Oh. Wagan's talking about me. If you want more research on your book, I'm going to be going to see us for, I think, three or four days. And my little baby, my daddy's girl one, she has some real attachment problems with me. Like we have to turn on the podcast when I leave to go to the gym. Anytime I'm gone for two, three hours, it's like the end of the world. And I have cameras set up so I can call in and be like, it's okay. I'm here.

Yeah, and that's just for an hour. So we're going to go four days. So it's going to be really interesting. Oh, that's going to be hard. Yeah. And they like everybody, but it's just not daddy. We'll see how that goes. They're going to get a taste of your book, basically. I hope it goes well for them.

It goes for me, too. Hopefully I don't come back to something torn into shreds. Well, you might. That's the price you pay. That's the price I pay. They're pretty good. The other thing is I know I get yelled at a lot too. My one puppy will come into the bathroom and be like, you taught us that you're not supposed to do this in the house and you're doing, you're a hypocrite. That's the big thing.'t that funny we totally are yeah and there are some rules that we make that i'm sure seem completely arbitrary like don't take food off the table or the counter like we do it yeah but you can why aren't we allowed to do that and why don't we get to be on the couch and i don't know my dog's pretty spoiled she gets to do all these things maybe

your next book should be on discrimination and non-inclusivity in dog human world. Well, it actually sort of is. Oh, really? Okay. It's about living ethically with dogs in the context of this pet-human relationship and taking up things like, I don't know, is it ethical for your dog to eat poop? I don't go out and overwatch them, but if I catch them, that would be bad. Maybe not unethical, maybe just gross. Yeah, I don't know what they're doing out there. It's a pretty big yard.

So it's just as long as they don't do that in the house, like bring it in the house and be like, hey, this is great, which they've done from every couple years, something like that will happen where someone will bring one in and you're like, no, we're not doing this. But we have a bone problem with bones because they give them like marrow bones or something like that. They'll bring the marrow burn in the house and you're just like, no, that's nasty. Get it outside. Yeah. But maybe I'm just being unethical.

Or maybe they are. Yeah. Something like that. I'll call my attorney. Yeah, I think you ought to work this out. Yeah, they have their own attorneys and their own podcast too. Oh, that's great. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, in this new book, I use a phrase. I didn't come up with it. I think it is from a veterinarian named Karen Overall, which she talks about negotiated settlements with our dogs. Just basically what living with a dog is that we just have to figure out the compromises that work because their natural behaviors are very different from our preferred natural behaviors, but we can't just ask them not to do anything that they feel highly motivated to do. There you go.

So I didn't know I was extorting them, training them all this time, where I'm like sit and roll over and play dead and those sort of things. Has that been extortion on my part where I've been some form of? Well, it could be seen in that way. It could be also them manipulating you and training you. Ah, now we have it. I am the trained dog. They are not.

Yeah, I don't think we give them enough credit for, they really are, have more control over the situations than we'd like to think. Because we're very self-centered. We just let this idiot think he's in control. Like, we just let him. We're just playing along with him. I get that a lot.

I'll put up a video on Facebook and people know how crazy I am about my dogs. And they'll be like, yeah, look, I'm controlling my dogs. And they'll be like, no, we're pretty sure they're running the game on you, buddy. So there you go. Anything more you want to touch on in your book before we go out? I don't think so. We've covered a lot of ground. Yeah, definitely.

Definitely a lot of dog ground. So give us your plugs before we go out so people can look you up on the internet, your dot coms. Yeah, sure. So my website is Jessica Pierce. It's my name, J-E-S-I-C-A-P-I-E-R-C-E dot net. And there's contact info on the web, the website. And I have then the psychology today blog,

which is all dogs go to heaven. That's pretty easy just to Google psychology today. All dogs go to heaven. Jessica Pearson, you'll get right to it. You'll see that I've been quite lazy. It's not lazy. I've been quite distracted in the past year.

More blogs are coming. There you go. There you go. I think all the dogs are going to heaven, and I think we all know where the humans are going. That's how it's going to all turn out in the end. Jessica, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming by and sharing all this wonderful stuff with us.

Thanks, Chris. It was nice talking to you. There you go. And to my audience, I ordered the book, A Dog's World, Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans. And if I catch my dogs reading it, I'll know I'm screwed. The books, you can check it out and read all the good stuff because I don't know, I love my dogs. And the one thing I do know is the rule of life. The more I get to know people, the more I like dogs.

So go to goodreads.com. Go to youtube.com. See all the wonderful things we're doing over there. All the groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.