S6. E7: Alexandra Horowitz: The World According to Your Dog
“I can drive my car off a cliff and just leave it where it lay, the most I'll get is a littering fine, and if you throw your dog off the cliff the punishment is actually pretty similar. That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So, unless you change that status, and you have people of course, who are thinking that there should be a status of kind of living property that might give them more attributes than my car has or my chair has; and then there are individuals who think they should be given the status of legal persons, which isn’t to say being people, but having rights of some sort. I think both of those are pretty intriguing offers. I think we're a little way off from doing that, but boy, either of those would be a massive improvement in our societal treatment of these creatures.
“And of course, I don't think it's just restricted to dogs… It's been terrific to work with dogs for all these years, but I think this way about lots of non-human animals that we interact with, where we kind of get to use them sort of, for our sake. I would love to see some kind of sea change in thinking such that we don't get to use animals in the ways we do now, which are really abuses of animals.”
– Alexandra Horowitz
If you have any questions for your dog, Alexandra Horowitz is a pretty good place to start. She’s spent much of her life researching and writing about what it’s like to be a dog.
She is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Our Dogs, Ourselves; Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell; and On Looking.
She is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard.
I wish this conversation had lasted all day long as I had about five thousand more questions for Alexandra - mostly, everything I’ve ever wanted to ask my dog. The time that we did have together was pretty amazing and felt like an absolute gift.
Visit Alexandra’s Website
Learn More About The Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College
Alexandra’s Books:
Inside of A Dog
Our Dogs, Ourselves
Being A Dog
On Looking
Transcript:
Alexandra: [00:00:15] It's been terrific to work with dogs for all these years, but I think this way about lots of non-human animals that we interact with, right? We kind of get to use them, sort of for our sake. I would love to see some kind of change in thinking, such as; we don't use animals in the ways we do now, which really abuses animals.
Elizabeth: [00:00:42] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask, if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people to find the show. This week we are resharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Alexandra Horowitz. Alexandra is a New York Times best selling author. She has written many books on what it's like to be a dog. She is a professor at Barnard College, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing and audio storytelling. She also heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard.
Elizabeth: [00:02:02] Hi, Alexandra, thank you so much for being here today.
Alexandra: [00:02:06] Hi, Beth, it's great to be here.
Elizabeth: [00:02:07] There's been this huge thing about pandemic dogs and pandemic puppies, and it's still happening. I know four people who have adopted puppies in the past two weeks.
Alexandra: [00:02:19] Wow.
Elizabeth: [00:02:20] So it's still going on. I know it's great that the shelters have emptied out, but there's also a lot of really kind of scary parts to this.
Alexandra: [00:02:27] Yeah, I think it's an interesting urge that we saw manifested when people suddenly restricted their social interactions with people, started turning toward this companion animal and adding more of them to their family, often maybe having not thought of adopting a dog before. I did a little poll of several hundred people and found that about half said, Oh yeah, we were already going to adopt or buy a dog, and the other half said that they weren't. So maybe you have 50 percent uptick and suddenly there is this combination of delight and terror in people's homes as they realize what they've gotten themselves into. I have some positive feelings about this. I mean, I feel very satisfied when people adopt dogs and take the time to think about who this individual is and how they can fit into their family. But I feel more pessimistic about the rest of the adopters who maybe thought it was going to be a little easier than it was to incorporate a new animal into their family. I know that a lot of shelters are braced for, and in some cases I have already seen a lot of returned dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:03:45] Oh, it's already happening.
Alexandra: [00:03:46] Yeah, it absolutely is already happening because within the first six months of living with a puppy or I guess the first two years have a lot of challenges. Especially for people who haven't ever lived with a dog before and just have an impression of it, have a kind of idea about what it means to live with another animal in particular, that it's like adding an object to your house, right? Once you've purchased the right one, then you can just use it in the way you want and they are in for a rude surprise.
Elizabeth: [00:04:19] In the decades, centuries that we've been kind of putting more and more of us onto dogs, what has that done to the actual dog?
Alexandra: [00:04:29] As animals living in our home, as non-human animals living in our home, which is itself quite fantastic that we have this basically symbiotic relationship with them. But they're not little people and we treat them more and more like little people. People dressing their dogs or spoiling them in the ways that they would like to be spoiled, you know? I think it's benign to celebrate your dog's birthday, right? But if we pretend that the dog cares about that, then I think we're missing something like, I think we're missing an opportunity to see who the dog is and what the dog really does care about versus just seeing them as reflections of us. I do worry in general that dogs are kind of being lost behind our vision of who they are. Since we started really selectively breeding dogs in the 19th century, we've also created all these breeds which look a little more human, they have flatter faces like we do, which is really, really deleterious for their health.
Elizabeth: [00:05:35] It's also kind of creepy when you put it that way.
Alexandra: [00:05:38] I do think it is creepy in some sense, even though we still do have a human urge to say, Oh, that's cute, right? That looks like a baby face. Look at that tiny little dog with the little tiny paws. Now that we're doing that and sort of designing them more as our accessories, little people accessories, I find that to be a kind of dangerous, definitely dangerous trend as well.
Elizabeth: [00:06:04] And not healthy for the dogs either.
Alexandra: [00:06:06] Oh yeah, all those short nosed dogs, the brachycephalic dogs whose skulls have been kind of smushed so that they have the short nose and they haven't been bred slowly over time to be like this. It's been one hundred years. They've gone from being a normal-faced dog to one whose soft tissues are jammed up together and they have trouble breathing. Their heads have been bred to be too big in some cases to be birthed normally, right? They have to be born by cesarean. Their smell is definitely restricted. This skin folds all over their face leading to all sorts of unpleasant conditions. It's very bad for their health. Yet I think the Frenchie, the French Bulldog, just became the most popular dog breed in America or rose up in the rankings to be one of the most popular breeds, which is amazing. It's one of the most ridiculously over bred dogs, and many, many individuals in that breed are going to have real serious health problems and just difficulty doing ordinary things like walking without being overheated, and that we find that cute somehow is worrying, to say the least.
Elizabeth: [00:07:19] Yeah, it doesn't say much good about us. So we're making dogs less and less dog-like is basically what we're doing.
Alexandra: [00:07:29] A lot of breeding is like that, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:07:30] For you at the dog cognition lab, I just learned that you have been doing remote studies. Can you talk about that a little bit and how that even works? Dogs on Zoom, right?
Alexandra: [00:07:42] Well, we aren't zooming with the dogs, although I have seen some dog labs do that where a researcher will kind of have a video call with a person living with dogs and instruct them on how to behave. But basically, we're doing citizen science. In fact, before there was a pandemic, we did a few citizen science projects. In those cases, we're always dealing with owned dogs. Usually these dogs could come to our little lab, which is just a little room where we set up some games or tasks for the dog to do and then the dog leaves with the person at the end of it. In this case, we tried to design some studies where the person could set it all up at home, basically, and we gave them pretty specific instructions. We gave them little videos of how to be an experimenter. Then they took videos of those studies and then sent us the videos and we were finding the data in there. We're the ones who are coding it and saying, OK, what did the dog actually do? I think for a lot of studies, this can work really well.
Elizabeth: [00:08:48] When the lab is open to real life people coming in with their dogs in real life, just so people have a better understanding of how things work there, you don't keep dogs at the lab, right?
Alexandra: [00:08:58] Right, right. Oh yeah, we don't keep any dogs. The lab is just a room that has basically nothing in it, except for whatever apparatus we need for that particular study. So yeah, we put out a call to people who live in the New York City or greater area who've said they're interested in doing studies with their dogs and see if they qualify for this study. If they do, they make an appointment to come to Barnard College. We meet them and walk them up to the lab, and then we explain the task and they either participate or they just kind of hang out. While their dog, let's say, makes a choice between two plates of food that smell different, for instance. Then at the end, Dog gets to pick out a toy from an array of toys that we have available for them, and they leave. So it's actually usually pretty entertaining. Some dogs are a little bit fearful. They don't have to participate if they don't want to participate. A lot of people want to know at the end kind of how their dog performs, and it's not really about that per say, but we tell all of them that their dogs are brilliant. So we're basically just trying to capture a moment of that dog's life, just like we do when we do naturalistic studies. If I go to the dog park and I'm looking at dog play. I'm just like overseeing a little bit of their life and in the lab, you can just organize it a little bit more so that you're controlling more of the variables, and it's more likely that you'll see a certain result, but same kind of thing looking at natural dog behavior as much as we can.
Elizabeth: [00:10:29] You didn't start out studying dogs or dog cognition, but you were one of the first to study dog cognition?
Alexandra: [00:10:35] I was in the wave of the first people to kind of consolidate the idea of dogs as cognitively interesting. So people had studied dogs. Cognitive psychologists had studied dogs, behaviorists had studied dogs and Pavlov had studied dogs, right. People had been studying dogs in different behavioral physiological perceptual ways for a long time. But there was a rise of cognitive science and cognitive psychology and comparative psychology where people are interested in. What do humans know and understand and how are non humans different or the same? In that field, which is quite a large field because of all the different non-human animal comparisons, dogs weren't really a subject. People studied the primates and they studied big brained animals and they studied animals of convenience like rats or pigeons, animals that you could keep, that they kept in labs. When I went into graduate school, I didn't think I was going to study dogs. I lived with a dog and I adored her. I was very concerned and interested in dogs. I didn't think that they were. I think I agreed with everybody else. I didn't really think that they were a subject of interest cognitively, right? We're more likely to look at close relatives as cognitively interesting. But then I wound up being interested in play behavior. It's something that might show us something about our minds, in particular in human infants up through childhood they play a lot. It's very critical in their development of a lot of higher cognitive faculties, sort of understanding a sense of self, realizing that other people have other minds than developing this theory of mind, being able to take on different roles, so imagining others perspectives, like a lot of that happens in play. So I was interested in whether you could see some of those cognitively sophisticated abilities brewing in non-human animals as well. I was looking for basically a playing species and lots of animals. All mammals play lots of non mammals play, but not all the time and not always when you're watching. Long story short, it wound up that somebody recommended to me, when I was basically at the dog beach watching my dog play, this is what you're looking for. So I wound up studying specifically dog play, dogs playing with each other and trying to see what they knew about each other's minds within play belts. So while I was doing that, there were people in Hungary. There was a researcher at Harvard. Also for different reasons, getting interested in dogs, and we weren't in communication with each other, actually. But eventually there were these parallel tracks burgeoning. People who decided, Hey, we should be looking at dogs as cognitively interesting. Then this field really has flourished in the subsequent 20 years up to now.
Elizabeth: [00:13:30] One thing I've heard you talk about too is, because we do this immensely with our dogs. I want to get into it. But I also have talked to a lot of people who are pathologists who shy away from the word anthropomorphism because it was such a bad word for so many years and so much science. No animals have no human traits whatsoever, but with dogs, we really do anthropomorphize.
Alexandra: [00:13:57] Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:13:58] To an extreme.
Alexandra: [00:13:59] Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:14:00] Right? So it's different from all the other animals that we've kind of abused in some way or another by saying everything was anthropomorphism. Talk about the anthropomorphism that we do with dogs because we put so much on them.
Alexandra: [00:14:12] Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Elizabeth: [00:14:13] It's a lot.
Alexandra: [00:14:14] It's fascinating because as soon as people meet and start living with a dog, they start to make all these attributions to the dog, right? A dog is in their home and they already know, you know, oh, he's just getting back at me. He really wants this. We're attributing a lot of things, and we don't know them at all. Types of things that we'd be more hesitant to attribute to an animal who we've never met before, who we come across in, in nature. So dogs are really subject to a lot of these anthropomorphisms, and I actually got very interested in them early and studying dogs. I really am just interested in the dogs for the dogs sake, right? Like, who is the dog? What is it like to be a dog? What's their perspective? But it was hard to avoid the fact that we have this whole vocabulary already to try to answer those questions. If I said, What's the dog's perspective? What does a dog think about? People will be able to tell me what they think the dog thinks about right. They're voicing their own dog's thoughts all the time. So I did spend a little time looking at that behavior. The anthropomorphizing of dogs and sort of why it happened when it seemed to happen most and examining empirically some of the anthropomorphism we make as we say, Oh, do these really play out? We say that the dog looks guilty when they've done something, which we think is wrong. But do we really know that that ‘look’ means that they're feeling guilty, right? We feel so confident in saying so. But do we really know? So I studied that, for instance, the guilty look and also kind of what prompts us to anthropomorphize. I think it's fascinating. I mean, I, like most scientists, was brought up in this world where anthropomorphisms were just verboten, right, you were not supposed to anthropomorphize anything. That's how you start from an ostensibly objective perspective to see your subjects. I have come to realize that I think first of all, there is no it's obvious, but there is no objective perspective, right? We're always going to take an anthropic approach. That is because we're the ones who are investigating. So the best we can do in my mind, is to just be conscious of the statements we make and not be kind of premature or peremptory in assuming that we understand what's going on in a non-human just because it seems so obviously so right.
Elizabeth: [00:16:53] When you did the study on guilt dogs or dogs that were deemed guilty, what was the result?
Alexandra: [00:16:59] Yeah. Well, I can explain it a tiny bit, if that's ok, if that will help. So essentially the context in which dogs are thought to be guilty is when they've done something wrong. I'm putting ‘wrong’ in quotes all the time because I don't know that it's actually wrong, but like something that person thinks is wrong. So, for instance, like eating something they're not supposed to or knocking over the trash. Then they put on this look that people know as the guilty look, and it might be sort of their head kind of low and their ears back and their eyes looking away and their body is a little bit low to the ground and their tail might be low and wagging between their legs. Or they might just get out of the room when they see you. So that guilty look seems to be to people, a sign that they know they did that wrong thing. So I set up a little experiment where dogs were asked not to do something. In this case, it was to eat a very delicious treat that the person put in front of them. Then the person left the room. One of two things would happen: either the dog would eat it or they wouldn't eat it. Then I called the person back.
Elizabeth: [00:18:11] It's like the marshmallow test.
Alexandra: [00:18:13] You had some seriously self restraining dogs, I have to say, and others who just gobble it up. So then I called the people back in the room, and if the dog had eaten the treat, I asked them to scold them however, they usually did. People would just say ‘Finnegan what did you do?’ This type of thing and if they hadn't eaten the treat and had obeyed this request. I asked the people to greet them happily like they would when they come in the room. I did this numerous times with each type of person and dog, but sometimes I fooled the person. So the dog actually had eaten the treat, but I told the owner that they hadn't. So the dog got greeted happily or the dog hadn't eaten the treat. But I told the owner that they had, so the dog got scolded unfairly. That's the one that makes everybody sad. Then what I did was I looked across all of the episodes blind to which condition was which. At how guilty the dog looked in every one of those cases. So you'd expect that they would look guilty if they've disobeyed. Less guilty if they've obeyed or none, if they've obeyed and so forth. But what I found is that they didn't show any different amount of guilty looks, if they'd done something wrong eating this treat or not. But they did show much more guilty looks when they were scolded, right? That included times when they hadn't done anything wrong. But I had told the owners that they had, so they were scolded. So what I concluded was that this look is not as much a look of guilt, but it's a look of what we'd call appeasement. Some people call it a submissive look, but I'd say appeasement because I think it's like a request. I see that you're angry about something like, Please don't punish me. I'm sorry for whatever it is, right? But not necessarily a look of guilt because it didn't come up when they were guilty, but they were just greeted by their owners, and it didn't come up when they'd eaten it any more than when they hadn't. So in the end, I don't think I can say that anthropomorphism is wrong. Like dogs don't feel guilt. They very well may. But that look that prompts us to make that statement actually is a sign of something else is a sign of their astute reactions to us and how they learn from us, how to behave in order to be better treated by us. When I see a dog looking that way, I often it kind of breaks my heart a little because I feel like that dog has learned that to not be screamed at. They have to put on this look, and then they're less likely to be screamed at right? They will maybe be given a pass for whatever it is. That isn't to say that dogs don't have a sense of right or wrong, either. They might learn the rules of your house. They learn from dealing with others, including other dogs, what behaviors are allowed and what aren't allowed. I just think it's a different kind of sense than we map onto them, assuming that they kind of understand the world the way we do. I think that's really the key. That's the essence of it, is appreciation that when we anthropomorphize, we're just putting our whole world view onto this animal, which is very different, and there's going to be a lot of mistakes that we make if we just do that without looking at their behavior first.
Elizabeth: [00:21:37] You write a lot about smell and dog's sense of smell and how their worldview basically is kind of through how they smell the world. In that sense when so much of what you're bringing in and how you're operating in the world is coming from, like different parts of the brain than for us. We get a whole lot wrong. I would think.
Alexandra: [00:21:59] Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, I think we really don't appreciate a whole realm, a dimension I guess, of what they're experiencing and responding to all the time.
Elizabeth: [00:22:14] Will you talk about that, first about how they smell and how their smell works.
Alexandra: [00:22:19] Their smell looks and works just like ours does. Which is that they have these cells at the back of their nose, which can kind of grab odor molecules out of the hair and transmit information about them to the brain. Ours work the same way. We just have hundreds of millions fewer cells than they do in their noses. They also have these very complicated snouts, which race the air up toward the back of their nose and become humidified and start to deconstruct the smell as they're sniffing and they sniff in a very fancy way. In fact, there are a lot of olfactory neuroscientists who work with humans who say, Oh, we're really great at smelling, and they're right. Actually, we are really good. We just don't bother all the time. So that's one of the things is that we don't do the behaviors they do. We don't stick our noses up next to things, and really sniff them closely as much as dogs do. So even whatever information we could get, we're usually not getting. So it works like that. I think what's important is I always try to make an analog to vision to how we see the world because that's just how we think the world is. You think the world is just what you see when you open your eyes and if you live also in smell or predominantly in smell. The world just wouldn't be there in the same way when you open your nose as it were, because scents don't work the same way as light. Light is just like radiating from everywhere and hits your eyes if you direct your eyes toward them. So if a picture is drawn right away but the scent is moving, you either have to move toward it. Bring your nose close to another individual. To see what they smell like or on the ground where a lot of scents have fallen. Or it's in the air kind of like a fusing from things and maybe coming over toward your nose. As a result, I think the world of smell is more in flux than the world that we see when we just open our eyes and we're like, Oh, pop, there it is, you know, it's a picture in front of us. So for them, it's sort of something is passing or they have to go search it out. I'm only really beginning to understand what that would mean, phenomenologically, what it feels like to live in that world as much as the visual world. But a lot of my imaginative research work is aimed toward that. I’m trying to take little stabs at, OK, well, then you know, how do they understand themselves through smell? Or can they see things that we think we see in sight? Can they see those same things and smell? Or do they see another dimension of it and so forth?
Elizabeth: [00:24:56] They can smell things we can't even imagine smelling from everything from cancer to emotional states.
Alexandra: [00:25:03] There are some diseases we can smell, but we usually don't. We just don't. We don't try to smell.
Elizabeth: [00:25:12] I didn't know that. What can we smell?
Alexandra: [00:25:14] Yeah. Doctors used to use scent samples of breath or tissue or whatever other bodily effluvia to detect diseases. You know, because tuberculosis has a kind of smell associated with it. Typhoid has a smell associated with it. And that's really fallen out of favor in medical science because we have machines and diagnostic tests that can do that right. But one hundred and fifty years ago, I don't think it would have been so surprising to find doctors who were getting close to their patients and smelling them, as part of the diagnosis process. So there are some diseases that have a smell. But yes, to your question. The dogs that have been trained to do disease detection, they are detecting minute minute amounts of the cancerous tissue, for instance, or cancer on breath. They're very good at discriminating like a source that has the cancer from one that doesn't. Partly that's because they can sort of see that all the time, but also they've been trained to tell us that they see it. So, yeah, we don't see that all the time. Somebody who was very intent on it could probably train themselves to detect certain smells that typically we think of a dog detecting, but we are ‘A’ not interested and ‘B’, we don't do the work.
Elizabeth: [00:26:40] So dogs can also smell hormones. So does that mean they can smell emotional states or a shift in emotional states?
Alexandra: [00:26:49] There's certainly a possibility that they can smell emotional states. Yeah, and frankly, I don't think anyone's done a study to really confirm that that's the case. But yes, they have the ability to smell hormonal, to detect hormonal differences. That's actually with this other organ in their nose called the Varro nasal organ, which is something a lot of mammals have, but we don't anymore so maybe. Dogs do seem to be responsive to changes in it in humans. So yeah, that is sort of a way of saying that they're detecting our emotions and behaviorally it also looks like they're noticing differences in our emotions, too.
Elizabeth: [00:27:27] Well, and then when people say, Oh, my dog's really empathic, when I'm sad, he or she comes running over and puts her head on my lap and a lot of dogs are like that.
Alexandra: [00:27:38] That's true. Yeah, that's a great anthropomorphism, and it seems to me it may or may not.
Elizabeth: [00:27:42] That's why that's what I'm trying to connect. Is that like a smell thing? Or is it just that just happens?
Alexandra: [00:27:49] Well if it is a smell thing, it still could be empathic. So there have been some studies which look at whether dogs come over more often if someone is crying than if they're humming, for instance, and they do. Now what the dogs mean by that or what they sort of think is happening is not obvious to me again, right? I also don't think that necessarily they're coming over more often means that they, I think of the times a dog hasn't come over as similar evidence that bears on this question. If I'm crying and my dog doesn't come over, do they hate me? No, I don't think so. I think that it actually just has a different value for them than it does for me. For instance, if I were crying all the time, I would expect that they'd never come over because. They've become habituated to this state, but it's not because they've become less caring. So I think again that's a type of thing. There is a behavior there to be investigated, but it's not obvious that dogs are having this experience that we want to put on them.
Elizabeth: [00:28:49] So for people who especially well, for anybody with a dog, what can people do to make their lives more animal, you know, less human. Especially like people in urban areas that have really, I feel maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like if you live in a city dogs are really turned into little babies.
Alexandra: [00:29:08] I think that's the case in some ways because they're more circumscribed from like they can't wander on their own and so forth. Or in a large enclosure, they're up against a lot of other people and dogs. But here's the caveat I would put on that. I would like people to treat dogs as more of an animal, but they still are a domesticated animal. We have domesticated them for thousands of years and I think we have to acknowledge that their natural place at this point is in a human society and with humans. So being around humans and maybe even many humans is not necessarily a bad thing for dogs. It is, in fact, the only thing for dogs, even dogs who are free ranging stay around human settlements, right? They kind of count on human society for their livelihood. So I think that within that we can still take a step back from this kind of making them many people and let them do more dog-like things. So some of the things that I think about a lot. I mean, one of them is smelling, allowing them to smell because we are not real fans of going up and smelling each other closely. We think that it's often thought that the dog smelling another dog closely is rude behavior. That's literally the word that's used rude. There might be rude dogs, right? But I tell you what that other dog will tell them, they're rude. We don't have to kind of prophylactically say, like, it's not polite to sniff other dogs. That is literally the way they get information about other dogs, about each other that is part of their greeting, just like they smell you when they meet you. When you see your own dog or you meet a new dog, you let them smell you. So this whole notion that they shouldn't be sniffing each other or shouldn't be sniffing things on the street or on your walk. Certainly, you don't want them putting a lot of things in their mouth, but like, that's how they're seeing the world. So acknowledging that and letting them have more of that time instead of putting our conception of the type of person it would be, who goes around and sniffs other people's butts and sniffs fire hydrants. We have to get away from that thinking. I think that's one type of thing, giving them a little more space to be themselves, even in the home, acknowledging that they're not going to understand the rules of a household, right. Instead giving them more chances to choose when to do things. They have very little choice because dogs will often go out when I want to take them out, right? I'm not asking them when to go out. They eat when I'm ready for them to eat. I'm not asking them. I think that letting them make more choices is still compatible with living with people, and that also gives them more kind of agency as animals.
Elizabeth: [00:31:59] This kind of goes back to talking about the human side of the human dog relationship. Our dogs ourselves, you talk about the law. I think in this country at least, we think we've come, and we have come a really long way compared to where we were. We've come a long way compared to a lot of other parts of the world in the sense that we don't have a dog meat trade. We have some laws. But for a lot of dogs in this country, life is not good. Between social media and the pandemic puppies. We have this kind of societally, we have this vision of dogs in America have it great, right? But we still euthanize a ton of dogs. The laws still don't really cover much. You can pretty much abuse it and be ok.
Alexandra: [00:32:48] You can shoot a dog if you think they're threatening you. You can end a dog's life, right? Yeah, they're still property. That's what it comes down to, right. So the protections for dogs are not great, and if they're unwanted property, they could be killed. They can be euthanized. We're still euthanizing over a million dogs a year as a country. People can excuse all sorts of behavior, bad behavior towards dogs by, this is my property. I can treat it as I want. So even though there are welfare acts and there are some fines for certain specific kinds of abuses towards dogs, they're pretty impotent. I don't think they're doing the job of preventing people from. Behaving this way at all. They're barely a slap on the wrist when people do get caught behaving this way. Yeah, yeah, that's the current state of dogs in our society and the ones we see on Instagram are not those dogs, right? Per say, although some of them might be. In some cases, a lot of people still believe physical punishment is an appropriate way to interact with your dog. Lots of dogs, once they get past that cute stage when people have adopted them or purchased them, as I say, they abandon the return to shelter. So, yeah, we're viewing them like accessories, and that's also part of their property status. So there are a lot of people who are working to change that status. I think that that's a really, really interesting part. It's not part of cognitive science per say, but it really bears on things that I'm interested in in research, which is sort of about who are these animals? How can we treat them respectfully for themselves versus treating them as an appendage of us, as a thing that we own?
Elizabeth: [00:34:38] How does that change? Like what needs to happen?
Alexandra: [00:34:41] I think they have to not be considered as ‘simply owned property’ because as long as they are, you can. We really can't significantly restrict people's behavior toward their property. That's all there is to it. Right. I could drive my car off a cliff, and that's it. Just leave it where it lay. The most I'll get is a littering fine. But if you throw your dog off the cliff, the punishment is actually pretty similar, you know? That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So unless you change that status and you have people, of course, who are thinking, well, there should be a status of living property that might give them more attributes than my car has or my chair has. Then there are individuals who think they should be given the status of legal persons, which isn't to say, people being people, but having rights of some sort. I think both of those are pretty intriguing offers and I think we're a little ways off from doing that. But boy, either of those would be a massive improvement in our societal treatment of these creatures. Of course, it's not known when I say this too, I don't think it's just restricted to dogs. So my whole research program has been about dogs, kind of initially because they were a great subject. I then got interested in dogs so much that they were unexplored and unknown. It's been terrific to work with dogs for all these years, but I think this way about lots of non-human animals that we interact with, right? We kind of get to use them for our sake. I would love to see some kind of sea change in thinking such that we don't get to use animals in the ways we do now, which are really abuses of animals. Yeah, I think it's interesting to think of the dogs as either the first maybe the first ones for whom that would happen or the kind of ambassadors for other animals, you know, in this respect. I hope that they can be seen that way. But in some ways they're atypical because in their status as pets, they really have a singular place in our lives and I appreciate that as well.
Elizabeth: [00:36:55] Well, and it's one of those things, too. That's just so astonishing that people will literally spend months planning on getting this dog and in a lot of cases, a fortune on this dog. Then three months later, the dog is totally worthless to them and they just throw it in a pound or throw it in a shelter. It's just crazy that that's even how the system is allowed to operate.
Alexandra: [00:37:19] Right, right.
Elizabeth: [00:37:20] And so that would stop.
Alexandra: [00:37:21] Yeah. If you no longer let dogs be purchased, for instance. Or if there had to be some kind of basically mandatory education or understanding of what you're getting into before you live with a dog, then there's some sort of serious vetting. Then I think we'd less often have that situation.
Elizabeth: [00:37:45] I don't want to end on a sad note, so tell me something happy. Is there a new book coming? Are you working on a new book?
Alexandra: [00:37:53] Yeah, in fact, and it involves a puppy.
Elizabeth: [00:37:57] A pandemic puppy?
Alexandra: [00:37:59] Well, actually, we did get her at the beginning of the pandemic. She was kind of a planned dog in that I decided to write a book on early development of dogs. Since all of the dogs who I've lived with or dogs I've gotten from shelters. At the very earliest I got a dog I think they were 16 weeks of age, so I found this to be intriguing that I never knew a dog in the first months of their life. These are extremely important months of dogs' lives, ones that will, I don't think I think it's safe to say, like setting them up for the rest of their life. Create phobias and problems which will manifest for the rest of the life. Or like expose them to things that will make them more sociable and easier to bond with and the rest of the world. So I'm very interested in this kind of time that's unseen by most people who don't themselves breed dogs or rescue dogs. So I decided to write a book about the first year of a dog's life, and this involved knowing a dog for the first year of her life. So I was following litters, actually, and this is very tricky because I didn't want to buy a dog because I don't think the dogs should be purchased. I don't think we should be breeding dogs for sale in most cases for companion ownership. So I was following a litter which had been rescued, the mother had been rescued, actually. So I met this particular litter right after they were born. I was visiting them every week with the foster woman, this amazing woman who had taken the mother and her 11 pups as it happened and she was great. I took it all in stride and so I was visiting her weekly and that's when everything shut down when they were about six weeks old. I thought, Oh, I think we're going to have to get a puppy from this litter, I had seen other litters. I've followed other litters and I wasn't committed to any particular litter or any particular dog. I just wanted to experience a bunch of early pup development. So we wound up adopting a dog from that litter. We've lived with her since obviously, she's part of our family now. So I'm writing a book on this first year of her life, which was not always easy, but it can be very fun and entertaining. It's not going to be like a Marley and me book. It's going to be about science, but also the individual who we've met, right? So that's nice.
Elizabeth: [00:40:35] Wow. Oh, that's awesome. I can't wait. So it's not going to be out for a while, then you're still working on it.
Alexandra: [00:40:41] No, I'm still writing it. So I think it's got another half year in the cooker and then maybe it'll be out in two thousand twenty two, if I'm lucky. Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:40:53] I can't wait. Alexandra, thank you so much for being here today.
Alexandra: [00:40:57] Well, it's a pleasure. Thanks for all that you do with this show.
Elizabeth: [00:41:10] To learn more about Alexandra, her books and the Dog Cognition Lab, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe to Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people to find the show. If you would like to support the podcast or become a Species Unite member, which we would love, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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