Today, Explained - Can we ever know our dogs?

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

So many of us believe we understand what our pets are feeling. Are we fooling ourselves? This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Miranda Kennedy and Naureen Khan, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered byPatrick Boyd and hosted by Noam Hassenfeld. Photo by Kylie Cooper for The Washington Post via Getty Images. If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I think we have to try to take the dog's point of view. A couple weeks ago, I went to my friend's backyard to see him play a show. So from here on out, it's only songs about dogs. A literal dog show. Well, a good dog on the ground's worth three in the saddle. No matter where you're from. Been many a good dog, his friend knew him. But Sam was the greatest one.

He was a pound of house. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, by the way, sitting in for J.Q. this week. And I'm not exactly a dog guy. I mean, I'm not a hater. I love petting a fuzzy puppy in a sunny spot as much as the next guy. I mean, I'm not a hater. I love petting a fuzzy puppy in a sunny spot as much as the next guy. But these people at this show, these were dog people. Well, a three-legged dog walks into a saloon and he says, I'm looking for the man who shot my paw.

And then there was me, Dogless, watching a band called The Beagles run through their greatest hits. Who let the dogs out? Everyone seemed like they were having a great time. The people seemed happy, the dogs seemed happy. But as I was sitting there, I started wondering, am I sure? Like, I barely know

what other people are feeling. How could I be sure about a dog? So I was excited when I found out a listener was wondering the same thing. The things that we perceive through our human lens to be sad or happy or whatever it might be, is that actually what's happening in the dog's brain? This question came from Jared Martin, who's a filmmaker living in LA. But probably more important than that is my little child here. My...

My child, dog child here, Enzo. Enzo, tell me about Enzo. So, Enzo is two and a half. He'll be three in early September. I've had him since he was about eight weeks old. He's trying to get out of my lap right now. He's a mix, a total mutt. And yeah, I got him, I recently lived with a roommate for like over 10 years, moved out

on my own. And I was like, thought it'd be great. And then I got really lonely. And I was like, thought it'd be great, and then I got really lonely, and I was like, well, I kinda wanna get a dog. And we found each other, it was just kinda like the stars aligned, and the rest is history. How well do you think you guys communicate? There seems to be something,

like a special connection that we have, I feel, that's different than other interactions I've had with dogs, but also like dogs that I've had, you know, in my life. I don't know, it's like sometimes I can just like look at him or I'll kind of give him a look, you know, like you might give a small child and they know what you're thinking. Yeah. Because he does have these little like talkative moments where he doesn't bark, he doesn't growl, it's like he's like mouthing actual words.

And I sent a video of that. Yeah, that was a crazy video. Enzo. No. Enzo wanted to play with a specific toy. And I told him no. Not right now. Not right now. Not right now.

And it felt like a moody teenager in a way, like talking back. That's how I took it. You're saying that he understands you. Do you feel like you understand him? You can look at him and know what he's feeling? Yeah, there's definitely times where that happens too. And he has sort of different ways of, I guess, you could say, talking to me, depending on what he wants.

He'll make different sounds for different things. Like, I know the sound he, like, when he's hungry, he sort of behaves differently and he'll make a different sound. Versus, like, if he wants to go to the dog park differently and he'll make a different sound versus like if he wants to go to the dog park and I just said his trigger word, but if he wants to go to the dog park, it's a very specific sound. He's getting my attention in a specific way versus like when he's hungry, like it's just a certain, I guess like energy level that I'm picking up on. I don't know.

I tend to do that just with other humans too, in terms of like, I sense people's, sounds very cliche. I'm an empath, right? Like I can pick up on people's energy and I feel like I can do the same with him. Lots of our listeners feel like Jared. They know their dogs. They get their dogs.

Hi, my name is Chelsea and I really feel like I can communicate with my dog. Her name is Sweet Pea. She is a Cheweenie and she taught herself how to say yes to things. So we adopted our dog Rico a couple of years ago. He was a Puerto Rican street dog. And from the moment I met him, I knew that he was going to be my soul dog. I've had my dog Vixen since I was 19 years old. I adopted her when I was in college. She is like my entire life.

I call her the love of my life, and my husband gets super annoyed, but it's true. There you have it. I believe that I can read my dog's mind. Maybe I'm projecting, but I don't care. I believe it's true. But at a certain level, even Jared isn't sure. I definitely feel these things and I just don't, yeah. There's sort of a disconnect there too

of like, am I actually understanding this the way I think I am? Can we ask Enzo a question? Yes, Enzo. Ask Enzo if he thinks you understand him. Enzo, do you understand me? Do you understand me? Yeah?

No? He's like, where's the reward? This week on Explain It To Me, we're going to ask the question Enzo refuses to answer. Do we actually know what our dogs are feeling? Or are we just fooling ourselves? What if you could make that stop? With LPL Financial, we remove the things holding you Or are we just fooling ourselves? finances, your business, your future. At LPL Financial, we believe the only question should be, what if you could? Paid advertisement, Anna Kendrick is not a client of LPL Financial LLC and receives compensation

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Visit servicenow.com. Lots of people are obsessed with animals. And it makes sense why. On the one hand, they're like aliens. And on the other, there's this feeling that they're just like us. You can see this in movies like Air Bud or Babe or Babe, Pig in the City. My human tied me in a bag and throwed me in the water. And yeah, it's fun to suspend our disbelief a little and watch a dog play basketball. But even serious documentaries do this,

like March of the Penguins. They're not that different from us, really. They pout. They bellow. They strut. You get the sense that so many people who are looking at animals are just searching for the little humans inside the outer shell. But there are some people who don't spend their time trying to find the little humans inside.

They're obsessed with how alien animals are. I grew up watching Animal Planet. I started when I was like three years old. And I thought what makes animals so cool is they're not human. Holly Molinaro is a researcher and a dog lover who just finished up her PhD at Arizona State. I have this vivid memory of first grade watching an ant crawl across the window. And my teacher yelled at me because I wasn't paying attention. But I was just fascinated with like, what could this ant be thinking? There's no way it's just like thinking human thoughts walking along the window.

Holly had the same question our listener Jared did. The same question I did. Can we ever understand what animals are feeling? I know from my own personal experience, like we just project our emotions onto animals. We think we know what they're feeling. And that has always just sat wrong for me throughout my whole life. Even though it's so fun to do, like my cat's sitting in my lap now. Like, oh my gosh, she's obviously loving me so much right now. But in terms of taking care of them, those biases can get in the way.

She did find some research that made it seem like even trying to understand other humans could be hard. There were these researchers that photoshopped the face of someone with one expression onto different kinds of body postures. So postures that were disgusted or sad or afraid or angry. But when people looked at these images, even though the face was the same, people thought the emotions were different. They cared more about the context of the picture than the actual face.

And so I was like, what if we just did this with dogs? What if I changed things around the dog and asked people the same question? What do you think the dog is feeling? So Holly designed a study. This study is called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Human perception of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors. She started with Zoom.

It was like, you know, 2021, so pandemic time still. And just like Zoom blurs out the background. I was like, well, I feel like I could figure out how to do that. Oh, like blur out everything except the dog? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Took a crash course in video editing on YouTube, you know? OK.

And figured out that you can, like, take away the background with software editing. But then I needed dogs to do it. And I go home for Christmas break, and I see my dad and my dog interacting. I was like, this is perfect. Can you tell me about your family dog? Yeah, Oliver.

He sadly passed away a couple of years ago. So it's really sweet that his memory now lives on in this research. He was like a beagle, boxer, pointer mix. We got him from a shelter when I was like in fifth grade. And him and my dad were like so tight. So we cleared out the living room. We moved all the furniture away.

And I just asked my dad to do things that people would think is positive. So like seeing a leash, seeing a all the furniture away, and I just asked my dad to do things that people would think is positive. So like seeing a leash, seeing a treat, getting praise, being played with, and then things that people would think Oliver doesn't like. So seeing the cat, the vacuum cleaner, being reprimanded, I just filmed everything to make sure that I got like a bunch of videos that I could then

figure out how to edit them. So if you're trying to study whether we can tell if dogs are happy or sad, how do you know if Oliver likes cats or vacuums in the first place? One was just like, we wanted to do like general perceptions of people. So like, what would generally people associate positive

or negative with dogs, but that is like a good point that has been brought up a lot is that I don't really know how Oliver was feeling with those things. You'd need to actually do some different type of studies to see how Oliver was actually feeling. But ultimately, in fairness to you, right? Like you're not studying what Oliver is feeling, right? You're studying what we think he's feeling.

Exactly. So I did the videos, so all you saw was Oliver on a black background. And then I set up this survey, I sent it out to ASU psychology undergraduates, we had like 400 participants in the first study, and first showed them six videos of Oliver on a black background. So three were when Oliver was in a positive situation and three were when Oliver was in a negative situation. And showed them just the video of Oliver on a black background and said, how happy or

sad you think Oliver is and also how calm or agitated. And then we showed them the original videos. With my dad in there, you could see everything. And this time, their responses were different. So before, when they couldn't see the backgrounds, all they saw was Oliver, they could not tell the difference between positive or negative videos. But suddenly when they could see everything,

they saw the context, they saw my dad, they rated the positive videos as Oliver feeling happy, and they rated the negative videos as Oliver feeling sad. Can you show me some of these videos? Let me open up my drop box. Okay, here we go. So you can see that. Oh, he's so cute.

Okay, I'll play it. Kind of like looking around, licking his chops a little bit. Seems kind of like a neutral. Okay, so what would you think the dog is feeling? I would say he seems relatively happy. Okay, all right. Now, all right, ready? Uh-huh.

Oh, God. No, he seems so sad now. Yeah, so Oliver looks exactly the same, but now that I see your dad yelling at him, it seems like he's learning a lesson now. Yes. So what do you think this study tells us about us, or about dogs, or how we relate to dogs? I think, number one, we're just not as smart as we think we are

when it comes to understanding our dogs. And sometimes people are like, that's really depressing, Holly. And I'm like, no, no, it's OK, because now we can actually start to pay attention. Now we can recognize that we do this and start to look at our own dogs and just kind of get away from blanket statements of, oh, tail wagging equals happiness,

barking equals upset, and actually pay attention to your own dog. I'm also trying to develop a new theory for animal emotion. A new theory of animal emotion or a new theory of dog emotion. A new theory of animal emotion or a new theory of dog emotion? My proposed theory is just to start from like a species specific point of view, and maybe like dogs have their own set of emotions

and try to figure out what emotional capabilities they might have that we humans could never even comprehend because we're not dogs. So instead of looking for, what is happiness look in a dog? Let's come up with just like a brand new word. Maybe dogs have some type of like happiness, but it's like subservience

because they like love to do things for us. And then we can like look at their behavior in this context and kind of piece together bits and then come up with a whole new dog emotion. That's really interesting. So you're kind of saying, let's not try to put them on our terms. Let's see them on their terms. Exactly. Exactly.

So what if we stop treating dogs like fuzzy little humans? What would it be like to see dogs on their terms, not ours? In a minute, we talked to a human who tried to become a dog. Woof. Support for this show comes from Attio. Attio is an AI native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. It's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. Setting up Attio takes less than a minute. And in seconds of syncing your emails and calendar,

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Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Why don't we start with your name and what you do, like how you introduce yourself at a dinner party. Well, I might not say this at a dinner party because then the whole dinner party will be about dogs, but I'm Alexandra Horowitz and I run the dog cognition lab at Barnard College in New York City.

And I study what it's like to be a dog. That is one thing you're right. You can't say that to people. It'll just derail any conversation. Yeah, it's really, if I want myself to be the center of attention, that's, I guess, the thing to say. But often I don't.

So yeah, I don't lead with it. Okay. So in the previous segment, we just heard how people can misinterpret their dogs. They can maybe think they're feeling something and maybe they're not feeling something. But you, you know exactly what they're feeling, right? Definitely not. But that's, that is entirely what I'm interested in. Okay. Sure. And I guess part of the first step is to kind of forget about my automatic

assumptions about what they're feeling, which is, which is a very normal step for people to take, especially people who live with dogs. But it's from our point of view, and I think we have to try to take the dog's point of view. Okay, so how do you start to take the dog's point of view? What does that even mean? So they are smelling animals.

Smell is their primary sense. And my interest is in saying like, well, okay, let's try to understand the dog's way of seeing the world through their nose. Instead of just assuming that they're just like us, you know, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I'm sitting on the couch. Yeah, I think the best way maybe to describe

what it's like to take that seriously, to take sort of a nose-first perspective of the world is to ask you about your experience doing this. You kind of did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog. How should I put that? Yeah, I mean, I tried to sort of step into some of the dog's behaviors, I guess, in order to a little bit understand them.

Because here's one thing about smell versus vision. We're visual creatures, let's acknowledge, right? We see the world first. But if you're a smelling creature, I thought, well, you know, how do you see the world? Smells don't just appear when you open your nose, when you exist in the space. If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right? They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground

or smelling objects that are nose height. And they sniff a lot more than we do. You know, our sniffs are pretty feeble little sniffs and they'll do seven sniffs a second if they want to get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things. I mean, that was just the first step is going around and saying like, all right, what are

smells like down at dog height? And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it? I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here. You're walking around, where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height? Well, I did this in New York City, right where I live. So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it's New York City. Oh no, people moved away from me, you know, that's for sure.

But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did. Where he sniffed, I would lean down and sniff with him. I would get to his height, see what he sniffed and tried to smell it myself, right? Is it a tree post protecting a tree from people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass? Something in the grass that is super interesting to him that I try to smell.

I didn't sniff other dog butts because there are other issues involved there. But if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend. [♪ music playing, fades out. What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog? Well, I think the big lesson for me was that unlike the way I had kind of characterized smells in my life, which I think is very human, as kind of good or bad, right?

Smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell or something unappealing. Like in New York, there are lots of those smells like garbage in the summer. But for dogs, I think smells are just information. They're just information about the way the world is. So their world is wrought of smells the way ours is wrought of visual images.

You know, when I think of looking at the world, I kind of create, I don't know, a spatial map of the world, right? Like I'll walk through my apartment and I'll look around. Here's the door, here's the window, here's the hall. If you're doing something like that through smell, on the one hand, I have no idea what that means, right? I have no idea what that means, right? I have no idea how to wrap my head around that. But what does that mean for the world you live in if you're mapping it by smelling it?

Well, a space inside, I think, is sort of redefined in smell as being less static, right? So smells move. That's one of the interesting things about them. So we know this, you have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table and you can smell it on the other side of the table, right? The smell comes out of it. So where that coffee is,

is like a slightly different space maybe to a, let's say purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature. It's right in the cup to me, but to somebody who's seeing the world through smell, it's in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air. Oh, that's fascinating.

That doesn't mean that there's nothing concrete and real. It just means that it's a little more transient than we see. Yeah, if I were to think about what that means for what it's like to be a dog, right? It feels a lot more chaotic. I mean, if I'm again, walking through my apartment, if I go into my living room and I'm like, okay, here's the couch, it's just right here.

I can put my hand on the couch and then I can put my hand a little bit to the side and there's no couch. And I feel like if I just smelled everything, everything would be kind of moving and fading and coming back and it would be blurry and chaotic. I think chaos, the idea that it's chaotic is just because we aren't using our noses this way. if you look at dogs behavior, it doesn't seem very chaotic.

I mean, their behavior kind of is consistent with this just very organized, but different way of seeing. It also feels like if things that a dog is smelling are changing all the time, it feels like the way they're, they might be interacting with the world would depend a all the time. It feels like the way they might be interacting with the world would depend a lot on time. Yeah, I think time is in smell. [♪ music playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano playing in background, with a soft, soft sound of a piano room to them, but a little less. Huh. And after a day, I'm a lot less in the room. And so they're sort of noting time, time passing by the changeability of smells. Wow.

That is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad. I don't know. Imagining you fading slowly out of a room, it feels like a very different type of thing to experience. Yeah, maybe. I haven't ever thought of it as sad. I mean, in a way, there's something reassuring in the fact, and maybe even alarming, I suppose,

but that I'm still here when I'm not here for them, right? And that when I come home and I've pet another dog or I've had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, that they can kind of experience that by just smelling me and seeing where I've been. To me, that's kind of extra neat, not melancholy. You know, a lot of the people we've heard from in this episode, they talk about this

ability to understand their dog and this connection they have. And then talking to Holly, talking to you, we're actually just really different from dogs. We can connect with dogs. We have these points of overlap. We can have relationships, but we are clearly extremely, extremely different. What does that difference mean to you?

Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting? I mean, as an experimenter, I do find it daunting that they're quite different than we are perceptually and therefore probably cognitively, but also exciting, right? There's a lot of possibilities, a lot of things we can investigate and learn. As a person who lives with dogs, there's the mystery of it, the mystery of what it's like to be a smelling creature and how we kind of get, even though there's this fundamental

difference between us, we coexist and seem to share a lot of things, at least share space during the day, right? Share a life. I find that mystery kind of delightful and I don't try to solve it in my ordinary life. You know, we've been hearing from listeners about whether they understand their dogs and a lot of them are like, yeah, totally. And I wonder, you're someone who understands exactly how much we don't understand our dogs. But I'm also curious, do you think you understand your dogs?

Oh, no. Uh-uh. Definitely not. I mean, I don't think I do. And I don't know how anybody could really, but they're familiar to me and we use all the anthropomorphic words that everybody uses to talk about our sense of whether they're feeling depressed or grumpy or proud or whatever, but that's just a gloss for me.

I don't really know what they're like and what their feelings are at any moment. And whether they choose to stay with me, if they had an option, you know, it's a very puzzling thing living with dogs. And I'm okay with that. As a scientist, I think I've just grown more and more agnostic. You know, I just feel like I know less and less in some ways.

Because I see how much more I didn't even imagine was out there. And that's delightful to me. Yeah, it's not to me about pinning it down and saying, well, now we have the answers. I mean, what's the fun in that? Then something that's pinned down and sort of completely understood, you put that away. You know, I like that it's that knowledge is ever elusive. Kind of like a dog.

At least one that you keep, though that doesn't come when you call. Yeah. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan. It was edited by our executive producer Miranda Kennedy and Noreen Khan. Fact-checking by Melissa Hirsch. Engineering by Patrick Boyd. And before we let you go, we want to ask about AI friendships. Do you have regular conversations with your friends, known as chat GPT or quad or Gemini?

We're not talking intimate relationships, but if you do have regular chats with some kind of LLM, we want to hear from you. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, this is Explain It To Me, and once again, meet the Beagles. Support for this show comes from Ring. A good defense matters. On the court, on the field, and in your home. From video doorbells that let you see more

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