I have good news for all of us who don’t look like Ryan Gosling or Gisele Bundchen: your dog doesn’t care. Dogs are much more interested in our smells than our looks. Just watch a dog with his head out a car window — nose forging ahead. Wind brings innumerable scent molecules directly to the dog’s face, which in the dog’s world, makes for a pretty good day. * You might look like a one-eyed pig, but to your dog, it’s your bouquet that makes you beautiful.

A Beautiful Sight to Sniff
Unlike us humans who preoccupy ourselves with visual landscapes, dogs smell their vistas. Maybe you’ve had the experience of walking a dog when all of a sudden the dog gets hooked on something. Even though that something is completely out of range and invisible to you, the dog’s behavior indicates, “What I’m checking out is really interesting. We are not going anywhere, buster.”

To get inside your dog’s world, you need to pick his brain—and his nose. Dogs have much more nose than us humans. Their extensive olfactory epithelium allows them to trap and assess odor molecules at concentrations of up to parts per trillion, while we are more in the range of parts per million. Yep. I said trillion. Their noses are about a million times more sensitive than our noses. Often, our brains can’t register what they whiff.

On top of that, dogs’ noses come equipped with a vomeronasal organ (unfortunately, it’s not a musical instrument). The vomeronasal organ has tons of receptor cells that take sniffing to the next level. It is thought to be important in detecting species-specific information such as pheromones. The main point is yes, your dog is getting quality information from that other dog’s behind, face and urine.

Smell Games
If you’re starting to look at your dog as one big nose, you’re in good company. Many of the folks working with dogs or researching dog behavior and cognition remind dog owners that smelly (or smelling) experiences are integral to a dog’s “good life.” In the spirit of picking your dog’s nose, here are four ways to give your dog the gift of smell:

1. Take your dog on smell walks
In Inside of A Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz recommends accompanying dogs on smell walks. She explains:

“[Dog]-walks are often not done with the dog’s sake in mind, but strangely playing out a very human definition of a walk. We want to make good time; to keep a brisk pace; to get to the post office and back.”

Dogs don’t care about “making time.” While walking with the dog’s nose in mind might alter total distance traveled, you and Bucky can bond over quality olfactory experiences. In a smell walk, Bucky might sniff as he likes, choose the direction of the walk or linger to get to the bottom of a particular smell. What else might you provide on a smell walk?

2. Consider smelling sports
Taking a cue from drug sniffing dogs, K9 Nose Work has recently become a formalized fun activity and a favorite of many companion dogs and owners alike.

You don’t have to turn your dog into a narc to get into smelling sports. It’s about “getting your dog excited about using his nose to seek out a favorite toy or treat reward hidden in one of several boxes.” (K9 Nose Work)

The game can then be expanded to include entire rooms, exterior areas and even vehicles. Of course, scent work can be conducted in less formalized ways. Don’t be afraid to get creative with smelling sports. One man’s narc is another man’s truffle pig.

3. Make up your own smell(y) games
Have you ever put your dog’s olfaction to the test? After being out of the country for a year, my friend and I wanted to see whether her dog would remember me. Our sneaky setup was unscientific and simple: Millie and her owner would walk down the street, and I would walk past them, coming up from behind and not interacting in any way, to see whether Millie paid me any mind. As I walked past, Millie turned toward what could have just been another stranger in NYC, and gave one of those glorious welcomes that says, in not so many words, “YOU ARE HERE! YOU ARE HERE! IT’S YOU!! YAYAYAYAYAY!!”

It’s possible this is more of a game for my friend and me than Millie. Still, it’s a reminder to us humans – who often need reminders – that the nose is a great way to connect with a dog.

4. Make your reunion smelly
Try making “smell” a priority when greeting dogs. While most people don’t overtly sniff and greet, we need to keep in mind that Scruffy’s schnozzle is her window to the world. You want to keep that window wide open, not close it.

It goes back to our different biologies. When we people walk into a party, most of us look around, see who’s there and then make the next move (either toward a friend or toward the bar). For dogs, “looking around the room” is easier done with the help of olfactory investigation because visual cues could be misleading. Who hasn’t been confused when meeting a friend with a new haircut/glasses/facial hair/gorilla suit?

With dogs and their wonderful snouts, they don’t have to worry about mistaken identities. Sight can be confusing, but a smell check can set things straight! That’s the way you’d do it too, if your nose were a million times more powerful than it is.

Take a look at a reunion between a dog and a member of U.S. military returning from deployment:

When the dog initially sees the owner, we don’t see a “YOU ARE HERE!! EXCELLENT!” response. With only visual cues readily available, the dog doesn’t seem to “see” his owner. Instead, the dog shows:

• Tail low and tucked

• Low posture

• Moving toward yet away

• Barks more in line with “stranger” than “happy”

The owner then provides the dog a hand for sniffing, and after olfactory investigation, the dog shows a proper display of, “IT’S YOU!! IT’S YOU!! YAYAYAYA!”

Does this video surprise you? And just as important, do you give your dog opportunities for olfactory exploration during greetings?

Sniff Time
There are things out there in the world that you might not notice and can’t understand but that your dog is very in tune with and would like a closer look (oh please!). And these things have nothing to do with whether you are Ryan Gosling (but if you are Ryan Gosling, feel free to give me a call).

Photos: She nose you know photographed by Mark Kelly, Dog smelling sunflowers by Dylan, both used under Creative Commons license

References
Horowitz. 2009. Inside of a Dog What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. Scribner
Wells & Hepper. 2003. Directional tracking in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 84, 297-305.

* Wind can play a part in scent detection. A recent paper exploring directional tracking in dogs notes that the researchers laid trails at a “ninety degree angle to the direction of the oncoming wind to reduce the possibility of the dogs using airborne scent to determine directionality.” It’s easier to attend to a scent if airborne scent molecules are flying directly into your face, like a car ride.

I have to assume John Bohannon woke up one morning and thought, “What does dog food taste like?” That, or he might have just been out of food and people were coming over.

Either way, the outcome was the same. Bohannon gathered eighteen people together to voluntarily consume dog food in a study investigating whether people can distinguish pâté from dog food. Using a double blind taste test, the study ultimately investigated dog food’s palatability.

The study was not a frolic and a detour. If dog food were found comparable in taste to pâté, “[dog food] could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst.”

How to eat dog food
And so Bohannon and his colleagues hosted an unusual dinner party that went down in history as the worst buffet of all time. What better time to eat dog food than on New Year’s Eve! On December 31, 2008, 18 subjects, also known as party-goers, gathered in Brooklyn, NY where they dined on 5 different spreads. Four were human-intended, meat-based products and one was the infamous dog food, in this case, Newman’s Own.

The five samples — duck liver mousse, pork liver pâté, liverwurst, Spam and dog food — were pulsed in a food processor so each had the same mousse-like consistency. Samples were then placed in serving bowls, chilled to 4 degrees Celsius and garnished with parsley. To make things extra-fancy, subjects sampled the spreads as many times as needed on Carr’s Table Water Crackers (clearly it’s a topnotch party when you can have as many Carr’s crackers as you want).

How to rank dog food
So how does one determine the palatability of dog food? See who vomits first? Maybe in your study. After tasting the samples, subjects in this study provided two critical pieces of information:
1. Sample rankings from best to worst
2. Educated guesses about which of the five spreads was dog food

Who wants dog food?
The ranking findings are not surprising. Humans do not like the taste of dog food. Over half the subjects, 72% (13 people) ranked the dog food dead last. The duck liver mousse was ranked first by 55% (10 people).

But here’s where things get weird. Although most subjects ranked Sample C, the dog food, as the worst tasting spread, when asked to report which sample was in fact dog food, most people did not guess Sample C! In fact, only 3 of the 18 subjects correctly identified Sample C as dog food! Instead, 44% (8 people) incorrectly chose liverwurst as the dog food.

As the authors suggest, the subjects could have been primed to expect the dog food to taste better than it did. After all, the dog food was Newman’s Own, and who doesn’t love Paul Newman? Additionally, since subjects were assured that their “experience would not be disgusting, they might have excluded the worst-tasting sample from their guesses.”

Morals to eating dog food
- If you serve your guests dog food, they won’t like it. But they also won’t necessarily know it’s dog food, so it’s worth a try.
- People are weird, better to study dogs.

A version of this post originally appeared on Dog Spies Blogger. It is being re-posted after being reminded of horrible tasting cafeteria food at a college reunion.

Images: Feature image via The Momfessional (Reminder: children around dog bowls, bad idea. See Do You Believe in Dog? posts The Science Surrounding Children & Dogs: Part 3 The Ugly and Dogs and babies: Not always cute); Video: Terrance eating.

Reference
Bohannon et al., 2009. Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food? American Association of Wine Economists. Working Paper No. 36

Chaser the Border Collie is back in the news. She initially captured headlines in 2011 as “the smartest dog in the world” when research published in Behavioral Processes reported that she knew the names of 1,022 distinct objects. Now, Chaser’s way with words is being revisited in a special “dog” issue of Learning and Motivation. Chaser is now being hailed a “grammar hound” after successfully attending to syntactical relationships between words in sentences, like differentiating “to ball take Frisbee” from “to Frisbee take ball.” You can check out Chaser in action on her YouTube channel.

But is Chaser the dog equivalent of Beyonce, a god among mortals? Or might other dogs have a similar panache for language? And how might you test whether your dog understands your words as you intend them?

To learn more, check out my recent article over at The Bark Magazine: Do Dogs Understand Our Words?, which includes interviews with:

• John Pilley, Chaser’s owner, and the author of the new research paper

• Julia Fischer, Daniela Ramos and Susanne Grassmann, researchers of other dogs like Chaser

• Denise Fenzi, professional dog trainer in dog sports

• Kate Schroer-Shepord, qualified guide-dog instructor at Guiding Eyes for the Blind

• Tom Brownlee, trainer of service and working dogs and instructor at the Carroll College Anthrozoology department

• Patricia McConnell, Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, discussing what her dogs do and don’t know when it comes to words

Reference: J, Pilley. Border collie comprehends sentences containing a prepositional object, verb and direct object. Learning and Motivation. Published online May 13, 2013. doi:10.1016/j.lmot.2013.02.003.

Photo © Chris Bott Contact at bottyc@aol.com or www.chrisbottphoto.com

SPARCS is a unique venture organized by Prescott Breeden and Patti Howard of The Pawsitive Packleader, Seattle Dog Training. From June 28-30, 2013, anyone in the world can see some of the leading canine science researchers in action — either in a conference hall in Redmond, WA, or streaming live to your living room.

SPARCS is short for the Society for the Promotion of Applied Research in Canine Science, which aptly summarizes the goals of the conference: (1) to promote research and education in canine science, and (2) to provide a platform for leading minds in canine science to present, discuss and debate modern behavior science.

Canine Science? Explain
If the phrase “Canine Science” gives you pause, I assure you it does not imply that dogs are meeting in the park to discuss the current issues of the day, such as:

• Owner Responses to Half Eaten Sandwiches: A Review

• Why Does the Cat Run Around at Night?: A Roundtable Discussion

• Where Are They Taking Our Poo?

Canine Science, generally speaking, is research devoted to the biology, ecology, behavior and cognition of dogs, wolves and related canids. It is a catch-all phrase that highlights the surge of research into canine minds and experiences. My article in The Bark, Dog Smart: Exploring the Canine Mind, describes this field in more detail. SPARCS brings together the following leading researchers to discuss their inquiry into the dog for a general audience:

Marc Bekoff is a long-time researcher and writer of more than 500 scientific and popular essays. In a book store? Check out one of his twenty-two books, including Minding Animals and the children’s book Animals at Play: Rules of the Game. He regularly updates a Psychology Today Blog, Animal Emotions: Do animals think and feel?

• Bekoff on dogs and their urine: Observations of scent-marking and discriminating self from others by a domestic dog (Canis familiaris): tales of displaced yellow snow.

• Bekoff on play: Social play and play-soliciting by infant canids.

Ray Coppinger has published over fifty papers on dog research. His favorite publication, however, is the book Fishing Dogs, a humorous and iconoclastic look at dogs, fishermen and professors. His book, Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution, is a classic text in the field.

• Coppinger on different behavioral sequences between dogs: Degree of behavioral neoteny differentiates canid polymorphs.

• Coppinger on improving assistance dog training programs: Observations on assistance dog training and use.

Michael W. Fox wears many hats. He is a veterinarian with a Ph.D. in medicine, and he also holds a degree in animal behavior (ethology). His career encompasses extensive research into dog behavior and development as well as holistic and integrative veterinary medicine. He encourages veterinary institutions to incorporate animal behavior and welfare science into their curricula.

• I covered Fox’s 1963 paper, Developmental Abnormalities of the Canine Skull in the Dog Spies post, Where Should Dogs Put Their Tongues?

• Fox on dog development during the first month of life: The postnatal development of neocortical neurons in the dog.

Alexandra Horowitz’s current research at the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College investigates animal communication and attention, dog olfaction, inter-species play behavior, theory of mind and anthropomorphisms.* She writes regularly for The New York Times, and her best-selling book, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, is essential.

• Horowitz on attention during dog-dog play: Attention to attention in domestic dog (Canis familiaris) dyadic play.

• Horowitz on the “guilty look” in dogs: Disambiguating the “guilty look”: Salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour.

Kathryn Lord received her Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology, which of course means she studies wolf pups. Her research focuses on the evolution and development of dog and wolf behavior.

• Lord on sensory development of wolves and dogs: A Comparison of the Sensory Development of Wolves (Canis lupus lupus) and Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris).

• Lord on the meaning of dog barks: Barking and mobbing.

Adam Miklósi leads the Family Dog Project at the Department of Ethology at  Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where I had the pleasure of conducting my Masters research (covered on SciAm by Jason Goldman of The Thoughtful Animal). In the last 15 years, the Family Dog Project research group has published over 100 scientific papers and organized the inaugural Canine Science Forum in 2008. His book, Dog Behavior, Evolution and Cognition is required reading in canine ethology.

• Miklósi on the building blocks of meaningful social interactions: On the utilization of social animals as a model for social robotics.

• Miklósi on other species’ use of human communicative gestures: A comparative analysis of animals’ understanding of the human pointing gesture.

Monique Udell has worked with a variety of species such as wild cats, megachiropteran bats, coyotes, foxes, mice, non-human primates and a range of companion animals including dogs, cats, and ferrets. She has a special interest in how the cognition and behavior of domestic dogs and wolves can be altered by lifetime experience.

• Udell on dog sensitivity to human behaviors: What did domestication do to dogs? A new account of dogs’ sensitivity to human actions.

• Udell on perspective-taking in dogs: Can your dog read your mind? Understanding the causes of canine perspective taking.

Before Clive Wynne found a way to combine a childhood fascination with dogs with his day job as a psychology professor, he studied the behavior of animals ranging from pigeons to dunnarts (a mouse-sized marsupial) at universities in Britain, Germany, the USA, and Australia. Now head of the Canine Cognition and Behavior Laboratory, he is full of tales of everything from the tame foxes of Siberia to the dogs of the Moscow subway.

• Wynne on anthropomorphism: What are animals? Why anthropomorphism is still not a scientific approach to behavior.

• Wynne on the relationship between companion dogs and children: The other side of the bond: Domestic dogs’ human-like behaviors.

So, What’s This Conference About?
The SPARCS conference investigates dogs from three angles: “Origins in the Wild,” “Social Behavior and Emotions” and finally “Cognition and Development.”

Origins in the wild
“It is widely accepted that dogs are descended from wolves, but that is about the only uncontroversial fact about the origins of dogs…. I have come to a new proposal for the origin of dogs.” Clive Wynne

“In my presentation I shall talk about the emotional lives of nonhuman animals (animals) – beastly passions – and how they very much care about how we treat them.” Marc Bekoff

“The modern wolf and the modern dog diverged into their present forms, sometime, somewhere, and somehow. We should discuss those when, where, and how questions.” Ray Coppinger

Social Behavior and Emotions
“I shall also talk about why play has evolved – what it is “good for” and why it is very important that we come to terms with the details of what animals do when they play.” Marc Bekoff

“So the basic question is: What makes a dog skillful for living in the anthropogenic [human] environment, and whether we can claim that there is a parallel between some of the behavioral skills of dogs and those of humans?” Ádám Miklósi

“Dogs are socially and emotionally promiscuous and, given the right conditions, can form attachments to members of many other species.” Clive Wynne

Cognition and Development
“How the dog’s brain and behavior develop is integral to our understanding of critical and sensitive periods in helping facilitate a strong social bond and in enhance learning/trainability, emotional stability and stress & disease resistance.” Michael W. Fox

“[W]e must be careful not to forget the true diversity of the domestic dog population, or assume that the sum is more representative than its parts. Indeed, it is at the fringes of the species where we often discover examples of amazing cognitive feats, or hidden canine capacities unveiled by unique environmental or experiential contexts.” Monique Udell

“First, I aim to highlight and examine the attributions we unthinkingly make to dogs. Second, I use findings about the biology and cognition of dogs to create a better picture of the dog’s experience: the umwelt, or point of view.” Alexandra Horowitz

What About My Living Room?
Because SPARCS aims to make continuing education accessible, the conference will be broadcast live and free of charge: “As long as you have a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone, everyone will be able to watch our broadcast from anywhere in the world.”**

SPARCS plans to be a yearly conference, so keep it on your radar!

SPARCS Information
Ticket, Live Stream and Schedule

on Social Media
SPARCS on Facebook

SPARCS on Twitter

SPARCS #sparcs2013

All photos courtesy of SPARCS

* I manage the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia University. If you live in NYC, we are always looking for more dogs and their people to join our studies! Sign up here, and we’ll be in touch!

** SPARCS adds, “Donations are absolutely optional however graciously appreciated.  If you watched our event online and enjoyed it, consider donating to SPARCS.”

Related:
Dog Smart: Exploring the Canine Mind at The Bark
Talking dogs: Welcome to the 3rd Canine Science Forum at Dog Spies
Inside the 3rd Canine Science Forum at Dog Spies

‘Dogs and Cats in the Home: Happiness for All?’ was a Finalist in the inaugural ScienceSeeker Awards* in the

A version of this post first appeared at Do you believe in dog? (Twitter @DoUBelieveInDog) a joint pen pal blog between myself and Mia Cobb, an animal welfare scientist and canine researcher just outside Melbourne, Australia.

RECENTLY, I was part of a Cats in Context conference at Canisius College (say that three times fast) in Buffalo, NY held by the Institute for the Study of Human-Animal Relations (ISHAR). The previous conference discussed The Future of Zoos (and all talks are available online), but this year’s focus was cats, cats and more cats. Speakers investigated all angles of The Cat — genetics, domestication, cognition, nutrition, behavior problems, health issues, shelter and feral welfare, cats and the wildlife and cat hoarders.

Lucky for me, Cats in Context came with a side of dogs, in the form of my lecture ‘Dogs and Cats in the Home’. While 15.3% of pet-owning households live with both cats and dogs, cats and dogs as a unit haven’t received much attention from researchers.

Here’s a 100% made-up graph comparing the academic research devoted to “Dog”, “Cat” and “Dog and Cat” behavior and cognition. Dogs receive the bulk of the attention, cats get far less, and dogs and cats as a unit are way down at the bottom.

Odie and Garfield
When I say dogs and cats in the home, what comes to mind? An image of a dog and a cat sparring? An arched back? Piloerection? “Frenemies“?

The limited research suggests that many dogs and cats living together look like some version of this:

Odie and Garfield Research
One study used a questionnaire and in-home behavior observations to investigate the relationship between dogs and cats living in the same household. The overarching finding was that many relationships showed signs of “mutual amicability.” The researchers found that many dogs and cats displayed “a motivation to initiate mutual play.” Additionally, 75% of dog and cat pairs displayed nose-to-nose contact, which is characteristic of friendly and affiliative relationships, specifically among cats. So, it’s pretty awesome that the researchers found this behavior between dogs and cats.

One of the major factors contributing to successful relationships between dogs and cats seemed to be age of first encounter, suggesting that early introductions to the other species promote subsequent amicable relationships.

Of course, not all dogs and cats living in the same home are best buds, but what this research reminds us is that amicable relationships are not just the stuff of movies!

Do you live with a dog and cat? Do they get along? What’s your story?

* What is ScienceSeeker? As Sci Am Blog Editor, Bora Zivkovic explains, “ScienceSeeker is the main portal for collecting, connecting and filtering science writing online, especially on science blogs.” Take a looksie and see what you’re missing. Follow @SciSeeker

** The judges: Fraser Cain, Maggie Koerth-Baker, and Maryn McKenna.

Images: Graph by author; Get the cat! by Greencolander; Content dog and cat by Roger H. Goun, nose-to-nose by Livinginmonrovia

Reference
Feuerstein N. & Terkel J. (2008). Interrelationships of dogs (Canis familiaris) and cats (Felis catus L.) living under the same roof, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 113 (1-3) 150-165. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2007.10.010

London K. (2012). Piloerection: What’s going on when a dog does this? The Bark online blog.

What do you want from me?
Feuerbacher’s research investigates dog preference for different types of human social interactions, or simply put: What do dogs want from us, and under what conditions do they want it? For example, your dog might happily hang out with someone doling out hotdogs, but is your dog also likely to spend time with someone offering petting only and no hotdogs?

In Feuerbacher’s latest study, shelter dogs and owned dogs were put to the test to see whether they chose petting or food. Because dogs, being dogs, often prefer food when readily available, the researchers ran an experiment with multiple sessions where food became more and more scarce.

Feuerbacher wondered, “If food’s not available, will dogs shift their preference to the person who’s offering petting, hang out with nobody at all or continue to hang out with the person who had been giving out food but has stopped?”

During a 1-minute pre-exposure period, dogs learned that one experimenter gave out food while another gave out petting. Then, dogs had 5 minutes to spend time with whomever they chose, and they could move back and forth freely.

Petting or Food?
Many shelter dogs and all owned dogs had an initial preference for the person giving out food. But in sessions where food was not available, many shelter dogs spent time with the person offering petting. When food again became available, dogs almost always went back to the person with food.

Some of the shelter dogs initially showed a preference for the person doing the petting, not the person giving out food (although, eventually, they all opted for food). As you might imagine, dogs in animal shelters are frequently deprived of human interaction, so it isn’t all that surprising that shelter dogs would opt to spend time with people when given the chance. Alternatively, owned dogs initially went for the food person and stayed with the food person, even when food became more scarce. Owned dogs have ready access to petting from their loving owners (raise your hand if you are petting a dog right now), but food is not always available.

Raleigh
Raleigh, a mutt who had been picked up as a stray, was game for any interaction with humans. As the graph shows, when food was available (triangle), Raleigh was all over it, but when food stopped, Raleigh was all about the petting (circle) — he was quick to say, “bu bye food person,” and “hello petting person!” And when food came back into circulation, he was more than happy to accept.

“He’s a food type of guy, but he’s also a petting type of guy” Feuerbacher explains. In the session where dogs were exposed to continuous petting but food was doled out at 15-second intervals, Raleigh approached the food person. He waited about 8 seconds, and when he didn’t receive any food, he then went to the petting person, where he remained for the rest of the session. His social behavior was much more extensive than a lot of dogs.”

When the study ended, Feuerbacher kept an eye on Raleigh at the animal shelter. When he still hadn’t been adopted after 2 months, Raleigh joined the ranks as a foster dog in Feuerbacher’s home, where he now spends his time with three other dogs doing doggie things like waiting for food, snuggling on the couch and frolicking with his foster siblings. But he is also waiting for a home.

Adopt Raleigh
Raleigh is available for adoption through Phoenix Animal Rescue in Gainesville, Florida.

Raleigh, of course, has a Facebook page.

You can meet Raleigh this Saturday, May, 18 2013 at Petsmart in Gainesville, Florida.

Feuerbacher has good reason to smile when she talks about Raleigh: “I liked that he liked food because that helps with training. But I also liked that when food wasn’t available, he was really social. Everything he did was gentle. I just thought he was a really neat dog.”

Reference
Feuerbacher, E. N. & Wynne, C. D. L. Dogs’ preference for different types of human social interaction in a concurrent choice test. (In prep)

Images and graph copyright E. Feuerbacher

As a frequenter of Brain Pickings, an “online discovery engine… bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are” — I read Susan Sontag on Why Lists Appeal to Us, Plus Her Listed Likes and Dislikes. Who doesn’t enjoy peering into other peoples’ worlds, whether they be desks or lists of likes and dislikes?

Reading Sontag’s “like list,” I couldn’t help but think a dog might have written it. Sontag likes: the smell of newly mown grass, drinking water, large windows, dancing, hands and of course, socks.

If a dog were to make his own “like list,” it’s possible some of the above items would make the cut. But not every dog’s “like list” would be identical. Each dog develops its own preferences over the course of its lifetime — even starting in utero.

A recent study investigated whether dogs are learning olfactory information even before birth, specifically through their mother’s diet. In this study, a group of pregnant dogs was exposed to a novel flavor and odor, aniseed-flavored food. A control group of pregnant dogs received normal food not flavored with aniseed.

About 24 hours after birth, both groups of pups were exposed to swabs with aniseed and water. Pups exposed to aniseed during gestation preferred aniseed more than those who had not been exposed to the novel odor.

And it wasn’t just that pups exposed to aniseed were into novelty. Pups were also exposed to vanilla (a new novel odor) and water and showed no preference, suggesting that preference was unique to the odor presented in utero.

So maybe your dog likes to chase the mailman because its mother ate a mailman. Susan Sontag would approve.

References
Wells D.L. & Hepper P.G. (2006). Prenatal olfactory learning in the domestic dog, Animal Behaviour, 72 (3) 681-686. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2005.12.008
Image: Flicker/Stu-bear

Contrast that with the way you laugh when you are with your dog.* It’s spontaneous, raw and honest. You don’t mean for a laugh to pop out when Sampson is waiting for you to throw a ball and his rear end moves progressively faster and faster. It just happens. Sampson — waiting for a ball — is funny.

YouTube makes it abundantly clear that dogs do not have a monopoly on humor. Companion cats also tickle our funny bone. I’ll take a happy dog running amuck or a cat with a box any time, any day.

Laughing with pets
But which animal makes us laugh most (setting aside the Taylor Swift goat compilation**). Do people living with cats laugh more than people living with dogs, or is it the other way around? And what prompts our laughter? A pilot study, aptly titled Tails of Laughter, investigated those questions, surveying a small sample of people living with cats, dogs, both cats and dogs or no companion animal at all. Participants were told the survey explored how frequently people laughed and what made them laugh. Participants volunteered the information by completing “laughter logs” (yes, that’s what they’re called). While the findings are based on data collected on one working day and from a small number of participants, they offer food for thought into The World of Laughter.

Who’s laughing?
Not cat owners. People living with dogs or both dogs and cats reported laughing more frequently than those living with just cats.

Fine, but what were people laughing about? Maybe people living with dogs were cracking up when thinking about how last year on vacation your sister fell in that giant hole on the beach. Or, maybe people living with dogs and cats spend a lot of time reading The Onion or watching dog and cat videos on YouTube. Nope. People living with dogs or both dogs and cats reported laughing when pets were present more frequently than cat owners.

Why laugh?
Previous research into naturally occurring laughter finds that most laughter occurs spontaneously, not from mass media, recalled events or stock jokes. Laughter is most often prompted spontaneously by “something the individual or someone else said or did or something that happened to the individual or someone else.” And it most often occurs in social contexts rather than when alone.

Given the social element of laughter and our propensity to see companion pets as extensions of our social group and families, it is not surprising that we would laugh in their presence. But not all companion pets are necessarily viewed the same. An earlier study found that dog owners perceive their dogs as more “playful, active, affectionate and excitable” than cat owners view their cats. Differences in laughter could derive from actual or perceived differences in dog and cat behavior. Dog behavior, and the social contexts in which it occurs, could provide more opportunities for people to laugh.

I already mentioned a few of the study’s caveats (small sample size, self-reported data), but the most important one could be selection bias. There are notable personality differences between people who describe themselves as dog people, cat people both or neither (click here for an overview of Sam Gosling’s excellent study on these personality differences). It is possible that the current study is more an indication of individuals’ personalities and not necessarily whether dogs or cats are funny. People who live with dogs or dogs and cats might just laugh more, or claim that they laugh more, than people living with cats. Or maybe the people living with cats just had a bad day the day they completed their “laughter logs.”

This study also doesn’t investigate why people are laughing when pets are present. What does your dog or cat do that makes you laugh? Why is it funny?

Footnotes
*Of course, people can fake laugh in the presence of their dog. But it tends to be a nervous laugh appeasing another set of human eyes, with the potential to offer criticism or judgment.
** Some “goats” in the video are actually sheep, via Alan McElligott on Twitter @AMCELL

Images: o back to dogs via Flicker/ faster panda kill kill; Cat on stove, copyright the author.

References
Serpell J.A. (1996). Evidence for an association between pet behavior and owner attachment levels, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 47 (1-2) 49-60. DOI: 10.1016/0168-1591(95)01010-6
Valeri R.M. (2006). Tails of Laughter: A Pilot Study Examining the Relationship between Companion Animal Guardianship (Pet Ownership) and Laughter, Society & Animals, 14 (3) 275-293. DOI: 10.1163/156853006778149190

Dogs in pantyhose

Until recently, the only association I made between dogs and pantyhose would have involved an unfortunate trip to the vet. Of the inanimate objects pulled from pets’ gastrointestinal tracts — from drywall and hearing aids to corn cobs and toy cars — pantyhose, and their cousins, socks and underwear, top the list.

But last week, dogs and pantyhose found themselves a new union. Dog owners in China have started a fad of dressing their dogs in pantyhose and, in some cases, pantyhose and high-heeled shoes.

A response of, “What the…?!” flooded the Web. One early article even came with the disclaimer, “This post contains content that some readers might find offensive.”

A Huffington Post Quick Poll asked readers to vote whether dogs in pantyhose is “good old harmless fun” or “sinister and vile.” Readers show support for the latter: “I find these photos very disturbing and unsettling. They make me feel unclean somehow and I don’t really know why,” and “Absolutely gross, makes me want to vomit.”

It is easy to see why people would be upset. The images might evoke the sexualization of non-human animals or even bestiality. But for a moment, put aside any social (or sexual) connotations of pantyhose and think about pantyhose from the dog’s perspective.

What are pantyhose to dogs?
For one thing, highly constricting. Often made of nylon, pantyhose can easily cut off a dog’s urination and defecation pathways. And many of the dogs in pantyhose are pictured lying down, possibly because mobility has been hindered by, yes, those tight pantyhose. So a dog in pantyhose for an entire afternoon is probably not a good idea.

Dog in pantyhose

But what else? In the photos, the pantyhose don’t appear ripped or shredded. There are no massive holes or major runs from a toenail catching an edge. If anything, the dogs seem to have done a better job of getting into tights than I!

This is to say, companion dogs have been placed in pantyhose by the person or people they live with, seemingly without much resistance. Dogs didn’t wind up in pantyhose because they were ambushed by a stranger who jammed them into this attire. Dogs let particular people put them in this silly getup. Dogs and pantyhose is made possible by a relationship.

Behind dogs in pantyhose — and behind much of the dog-human relationship — is an immense amount of tolerance, often from dogs toward the people they live with. People do the silliest things with their companion dogs, things that, left to their own accord, dogs would not normally do.

We dress them up and have them eat like humans:

Two Dogs Dining

We costume them up for various occasions:

Elf Bruno

And of course, there are weddings and birthday parties. Much of this can be categorized as “putting things on dogs” both literally and figuratively.

Do dogs mind?
Studies find that dogs extend different levels of tolerance to people they do or don’t know. After being exposed to a threatening approach from either a dog’s owner or a stranger, the threatening approach from a well-known person didn’t rankle the dogs. Dogs tend to want to associate and interact with known people, even after odd behavior. For example, a dog might recognize when its owner is “just kidding,” as often seen in play.

But while many dogs living as companion pets might tolerate our human whims — and some dogs might even anticipate that a doggie costume signifies an awesome parade is up next (if they are into that sort of thing) — there are plausible downsides. Will people have an expectation of tolerance, assuming that companion dogs will be comfortable with and amenable to all the various social and environmental contexts in which we place them? The danger is that we might forget what the dog wants (and many dogs do not want pantyhose). After all, if we ask a dog what he feels like doing, here’s how many would respond:

Butt sniffing yin yang

Photos: Dogs in pantyhose via Huffington Post; Two Dogs Dining via YouTube; Elf Bruno via Cynr on Flicker; Butt Sniffing Ying Yang via Tim Dorr on Flicker

Reference
Győri B., Gácsi M. & Miklósi Á. (2010). Friend or foe: Context dependent sensitivity to human behaviour in dogs, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 128 (1-4) 69-77. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2010.10.005

Of course, this wasn’t the end to all play, just the end to Barbies. Throughout our lives, humans play. And what we call “play” can change over time and differ from person to person. While I might get a kick out of Freeze Tag, Operation and Mafia, you might be partial to Masquerade Balls, Ping Pong and Sneaking Up On People.

Dogs and play

Dogs, from the beginning to the end of their lives, are players. Dogs can be found playing with one another, with inanimate objects, and even with other species, ourselves included. Patricia McConnell, PhD and Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, offers, “Surely our mutual love of play is one of the reasons that dogs and people get along so well.”

Play does not come in a one-size-fits-all package. In a recent article in the journal Animal Behaviour, Held and Spinka note, “Defining ‘play’ is difficult because it covers many behavioural categories, varies considerably between and within species, and its single or multiple functional significance is still being debated.”

The famed American biologist E.O. Wilson adds that “no behavioral concept has proved more ill-defined, elusive, controversial and even unfashionable than play.” More recently, the documentary, Seriously! A Movie About Play!, now in development, discusses the intricacy, complexity and value of play with psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, and of course clowns.

What we do know is that when we see a group of kids jumping rope or a dog bouncing on a trampoline, something can stir inside us that is, well, playful. Neurobiological research suggests that play can be rewarding in itself, meaning that it can be displayed for its own sake as opposed to achieving some outside goal. Studies of rats and chimpanzees found that chimpanzees favored social play over petting or a nonfavored food item, and rats preferred playful companions over those who were not. Animals (ourselves included) will even work for play. As my mother always told me, “You can’t play with your Barbies until you’ve eaten your vegetables.”

Play with your dog, for science (by March 31)

In my earlier guest post on Scientific American, How Do You Play with Your Dog?, I discussed how play between dogs and humans can include play bows and wagging tails to chase, tug, balls and even fake-outs, to name a few. But how do you and your dog play? The latest study at the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab, Project: Play With Your Dog, sets out to catalogue all the ways—traditional, original, or creative—people play with their dogs.

Since December 2012, people around the globe have been playing with their dog for science and uploading a short, 30 to 60 second video to DogHumanPlay.com. The Dog Cognition Lab is still seeking the help of dogs and their human companions, and anybody can participate by submitting a video. What should the video look like? “Show Us How You and Your Dog Play” is the only rule. Apart from that, just make sure that the video captures both dog and human in the shot (and if you’d like, add a photo to the Wall of Contributors).

March 31, 2013, marks the last day to submit a video to Project: Play With Your Dog. Be sure to make a play date with your dog this weekend.

To participate in Project: Play With Your Dog visit www.DogHumanPlay.com

Thank you for playing!

Photo: Dog and Ball c/o Hans Dekker Flicker.com; Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab (Barnard College, NYC).

References
Held S.D.E. & Špinka M. (2011). Animal play and animal welfare, Animal Behaviour, 81 (5) 891-899. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.01.007

McConnell P. (2013). How Do You Play With Your Dog? The Other End Of The Leash (Blog).

Wilscon E.O. (1975). Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Harvard University Press.