• Dog Juice
  • Posts
  • 🧬 We Interviewed the World’s Top Dog Scientist

🧬 We Interviewed the World’s Top Dog Scientist

Here's everything you always wanted to know about your best friend

July 27, 2023

In Today’s Email:

  • You got questions? We got answers: We spoke to the one person who knows more about your dog’s mind than probably anyone else in the world.

  • “The Squeeze” aka The Internet’s Best Dog News in 60 seconds.

  • The Last Laugh: What we’re laughing with. Not at.

When Dogs Check Their “Pee” Mail

A few weeks ago, a friend introduced me to An Immense World, from Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer Ed Yong, and it’s completely changed how I think about my dog, and well, animals in general.

Here is a little summary of the section on a dog’s incredible sense of smell that will forever change how you walk your dog:

We heard from a lot of people who regularly take their dogs on “sniff walks.” Some folks even said that’s just their way of letting their dog check their “pee-mails.” Cute.

It’s true. Your dog gathers information via smell, rather than sight. According to VCA:

With a single sniff, noses interpret an entire story without words by using amines and acids emitted by dogs as the basis for chemical communication. The chemical aromas communicate what a dog likes to eat, and identify gender and mood. By simply smelling, a dog can determine if a new friend is male or female, happy or aggressive, healthy or ill.

When in a new territory, a dog can sniff a tree and determine what other dogs live in the neighborhood. They can smell a visitor’s pant-leg and get a good impression of where the person lives and whether he has pets at home.

Dogs also have a great homing instinct that depends on their ability to smell. Since dogs move their nostrils independently, they can determine the direction of an odor and use their sense of smell like a compass.

In Immense World, Yong talks to one of the world’s leading canine researchers, dog-scientist and “sniff researcher” Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, who studies dog cognition as a Senior Research Fellow at Barnard College at Columbia University. Since Columbia is only a few miles uptown, Maxine and I took a little trip uptown to speak with Dr. Horowitz.

Our Q&A with Dr. Alexandra Horowitz

Dr. Horowitz is the Sr. Research Fellow at Barnard at The Dog Cognition Lab, and the #1 New York Times’ Best-selling author of Inside of a Dog and The Year of the Puppy. We highly recommend both if you want to really get to know your best friend.

Since Dr. Horowitz is one of the leading experts on what’s actually going on inside of your dog’s fluffy little head, we thought we’d take the opportunity to ask her some of our most burning questions that we’ve always wanted answers to.

Here are some other big questions we threw out, and the answers we got back:

Bryan: What’s the difference between a wet nose and a dry nose?Dr. Horowitz: A wet nose is better for smelling things. With a wet nose, a dog can more easily catch odors on their nose.

Further, a dog will actually lick their dry nose to moisten it, to more easily capture those tasty smells!

B: How far behind human research is dog research?D: Dog research is so new. It’s really just the last 20 years that we’ve been looking at what they know or understand.

According to science journal Frontiers:

“During the last two decades, [the lack of canine research has] changed dramatically; canine science is rapidly maturing into an established, impactful, and highly interdisciplinary field.

Canine scientists, who previously occupied relatively marginalized roles in academic research, are increasingly being hired at major research universities, and centers devoted to the study of dogs and their interactions with humans are proliferating around the world.

The factors underlying dogs' newfound popularity in science are diverse and include:

  1. Increased interest in understanding dog origins, behavior, and cognition

  2. Diversification in our approaches to research with non-human animals

  3. Recognition of dogs' value as a unique biological model with relevance for humans

  4. Growth in research on the nature and consequences of dog-human interactions, in their myriad forms, from working dog performance to displaced canines living in shelters.”

B: Can dogs perceive time?D: Yes! There’s actually been researching showing that when dog’s are left alone for 5, 10, 15 minutes, or even 2 hours, the intensity of their greeting is much greater.

Here is a study published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, that attempts to answer that question.

“The Effect of time left alone at home on dog welfare,” (Vol 129, 2011) is a study that recorded the behavior of dogs left by their owners for 30 min, 2 hours and 4 hours, and found that if the dogs had been left alone for 2 or 4 hours they greeted their owners with more ‘intensity,’ and were more active and attentive, than when the duration of separation had only been 30 minutes.

B: Do dogs understand words or tones?D: Dogs do understand words to some extent. If you use “walk” the same way all the time; if you use “treat” or “toy” or “bed,” they come to learn that. But tone also matters.

So, it’s complicated. Scientists at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary used special technology to peek inside the brains of 13 dogs as they listened to their trainer’s voice.

"Dogs process both what we say and how we say it in a way which is amazingly similar to how human brains do," says Attila Andics, a neuroscientist at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary.

Not surprising. But what was surprising, was discovering that dogs also have a left hemispheric bias for processing words with meaning, which is definitely surprising to hear.

NPR reported on this study, with a fun little clip you can listen to here.

We asked Dr. Horowitz a bit more, which you can watch below:

There’s a lot of playful and anecdotal evidence that might hint at answers to a lot of questions, but dog research and science still has a long way to go to uncover the many truths about our pets and what really goes on inside their fluffy little heads.

Thanks to Dr. Horowitz for taking the time to chat with us.

“The Squeeze”: Dog News In 60 Seconds

Today’s Last Laugh:

This just in: Scientist on TikTok perfectly translates dog’s thoughts AND voices?!!

@chelseamkrause

#duet with @The Spooky Dog Lady #doggydaycare I couldnt wait to put this one out! I loved this video so much I wanted to give them indivi... See more