February 4, 2025 • 50 mins
On this week’s episode we tackle a question Devan has been grappling with while living with a dog in the city: Are suburban dogs happier than city dogs? To find out, we spoke with one of the leading dog cognition experts, Alexandra Horowitz. She heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard and is the author of Inside of a Dog.
The credit song is Big Dog by Maurice featuring Kenny Ning and Certain Self, who also provided additional music for this episode.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Manny, I'm Noah.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
And this is Devin, and this is no such thing.
A show where we settle our dumb arguments in yours
by actually doing the research. On today's episode, are suburban
dogs happier than city dogs.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
I'm a scientist, so I have a lot of trouble
giving black and white answers. But if I had to
give a black and white answer, I would say.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
No, there's no no such thing, no such thing, such thing.
Speaker 5 (00:38):
Maybe you'll make them back.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Hey, uh, this is Devin. Thought this would be a
good way to start this week's episode. I'm not walking
my dog, Allie. I guess this episode this week is
kind of about something I've been grappling with. When I
first moved to the city, I was someone who was
(01:04):
pretty dead set on not having a dog in the city.
I thought it was really sad to see dogs in
a city, you know, washing him just like poop on
the sidewalk. I thought, like, there's no place for them
to really run around. They don't have enough space. The
apartments are way too small. But now it's been going
(01:26):
on five years now that I myself have owned the
dog in the city, and I think, you know, COVID
was a pretty good time for me to put aside
all these preconceived notions I had about dogs in the
city because I was bored in the house. But now
(01:49):
I'm starting to think about it, if that was a
selfish choice, and if I'm really doing the right thing.
I have my dog ally live in the city versus
like being in a suburbs, are on a farm somewhere.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
What made you think about this now?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
So we're recording this right after the holidays, and around
the holidays, you know a lot of people go home
and bring their dogs with them. So I've been seeing
all these tiktoks. So I'll share this in a group
and I'll have you guys describe them. But at a
top level, I'll say they these tiktoks are people documenting
(02:32):
their city dogs going to the suburbs or let's say
a more rural area. This is all right.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
The onscreen text says, when you bring your dog from
your apartment to your parents' house for the holidays, and
the dog is kind of running around the house, obviously
very excited, wagging its tape, perhaps excited at the amount
of space that's in there.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's one let's put that into one bucket of videos.
The second bucket of videos I'm seeing are people who
are moving from the city to the suburbs a Morboro
area lift their dogs. So let me say, you just TikTok.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
The caption says, introducing our apartment dog to his new
house and his very own backyard.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And it is really sweet.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
You can clearly tell that this dog is so happy
about the green, the greenery h in the space and
just being able to sprint. Like there are no situations
in New York that I've seen where a dog can
just sprint unless it's at a park.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, all flee showers, right, It's only a certain amount of.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Time at someone's apartment, you cannot. A dog cannot sprint
because it will immediately just be at the other end
of it.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
We're not in that text bragget where you could sprint
through the apartment oli tries. But so yeah, this stuff has,
you know, has me thinking, I'm at the point of
my life where I am in no rush to leave
the city. I think I could live the rest of
my life living in the city. But I am starting
to think and be reminded of this hesitation I had
(04:16):
initially about having a dog in a city where it's like,
is he actually living a worst off life in the
city because I want a dog and I want to
live in the city. Would he be happier if I
moved to the suburbs?
Speaker 4 (04:30):
And I don't want to make you feel any worse,
but you got a big ass dog.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I have a huge dog. And that was another thing
that I said. I said, if I'm going to have
a dog in a city, he can't be big. But
Ali is eighty plus pounds, so he's a big boy.
And I do wonder if there's enough room for him here,
if he would enjoy life more if we were in
(04:56):
the suburbs. Now, Noah, you also have a dog here.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
Yeah, he he hates the city. He's smaller, he's about
thirty pounds. His name is Yeah, his name is riz Rizzo,
and we got him a couple of years ago now,
and yeah, he's never liked I think he likes us now,
but he hasn't liked the city. You can tell he
just doesn't like being outside. He's anxious and he's very
(05:20):
just like reactive to noise and stuff. Our man's on prozac.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Now, yeah, Rozak before which I.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Guess helps, but how do you identify that when the
dog needs to take that kind of.
Speaker 5 (05:32):
Medication, like it like he would basically if we take
him out on a walk, he would like shut down
and like try to just sit and like be really
freeze up. And this has helped with that, I think
at least. But then you know, we'll take him to
Julia's family in Virginia. They have a huge backdoor area
fenced in so he can take him off leash and
(05:53):
he runs around there and it's like obviously he's having
way more fight versus like yeah versus like we'll try
to take him to Prospect Park or something, but he's
so nervous. Just it's more like the walk over.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
There, it's ten to.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
Fifteen minutes, and he just gets so worked up in
there that then like we get there and he just
kind of wants to just go home. But when you
do take him to that backyard area, he's like running
around and doing kind of what we just saw in
the stick Tuck, like something clearly happier. Yeah, and just
like just more relaxed and exploring.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
So yeah, I guess the question is, knowing what we
know now, do we think suburban dogs on a wole
are happier than city dogs. Many will start with you
since you don't have any dog in this way.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
Okay, very nice, very nice. Yeah, just as someone who's
like so removed from this. To me, it's kind of
a no brainer, like, yeah, the big the more grass,
the more space, the dogs are probably gonna be happier.
But I don't own a dog. Maybe, but if I
had owned a dog, there'd be more new to it.
To me, it seems like definitely.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yeah, I you know, I think the reason why we're
here is because I think I agree.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
Another question for me is like, all right, if it
does turn out to be the case that suburb dogs
are way happier, at what point is it unethical to
have a dog in the city.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Wow. Yeah, it's a really good point not to.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Put my two dog owning friends on the spot that
I'm just saying, like I'm not I don't think dogs
can't be happy in the city, No, no, but are
they supposed to be here?
Speaker 5 (07:36):
My suspicion would be overall most dogs would be happier
with more space, more quiet. Generally, I like dogs are individual,
like not just be a dog oled lover, but it's
like they are different. So like some dogs can't even
see other dogs that they're gonna flip out, allowing that,
like every dog is an individual, I do wonder kind of,
all right, if all the basic needs are met, they're
(07:58):
getting attention, food, and every everything else that makes him happy.
I don't know, if you know, on a grander scale,
if one year in the city would be that much
worse necessarily than one year in the country, because like, I.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Don't think like my dog's miserable.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
I know if we moved next month, you know, upstate
or something and had a backyard, I would see different
behavior from him that I would interpret as being happier.
You know, Like, I don't know if someone could make
an argument that the city is better for any dog.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
After the break, we go inside the mind of a
dog and see what they see, smell.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And know.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I'm I'm Noah.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
This is Devin. So last time we talked, we were
trying to figure out if dogs in the city are
living worse off lives than dogs who live in the suburbs.
So as I was looking into people who study dogs,
there was one name that I kept seeing an article
after article.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
I'm Alexandra Horowitz. I'm a senior research fellow of the
Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So Alexandra is one of the leading dog cognition experts
in North America. If you read anything about dog cognition,
it's either a study she's done, or she's being asked
to interpret a study that someone else has done. And
she's also written an entire book on it. It's called
Inside of a Dog What Dogs See, Smell and Know.
(09:39):
So as I was reading through her book to prepare
for this interview, I quickly realized that I knew very
little about dogs. You know, I've grown up with dogs
my whole life, and I've thought I knew a lot
about them. So before we get to our answer, I
feel like it would be helpful for us to do
a little spark note version going through the book and
learning a bit more about what dogs see, smell.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
And now.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Chapter one, how wolves became Dogs.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
The story of domestication is actually constantly being evolved as
we have new or more powerful ways to study what
happened thousands of years ago. Our best guest now, based
on genetic evidence, is that dogs diverged from some ancestor wolf,
(10:32):
an ancestor of the current gray wolf that you see
in North America. Probably fourteen to twenty thousand years ago.
There were probably multiple domestication events, meaning different places at
different times, and maybe even repeatedly in a place where
there was a group of these proto dogs or like
(10:52):
friendly wolves who started to distinguish themselves from the other
wolves and started to affiliate with people, probably breeding intentional
breeding where I picked two dogs I like, and I
make them breed and I get a new dog that
has all the great features of those two dogs. That
didn't happen for quite a long time. It was basically
(11:14):
just self selection on the part of these wolves who
wanted to be around people, and also some self selection
of people who were agreeable to breeding around these wolves.
That started domestication, and eventually it became purebred breeding, and
now you have pugs.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
I'm having trouble imagining the first guy who was like,
I need this thing to be mine to a fucking wolf.
What was wrong with that person?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Wolves are kind of cute.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
No no, no, they look great. They look sick, But
I'm saying that I want one, but I wouldn't try
to do it.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
It's you know, survival of the fittest sort of thing
where you would be doing a lot more crazy up
in your life. So yes, you would feel maybe more
equipped to even tackle that sort of exactly point no
offense bottom.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
You know, you want to be able to go out
there and you're a different type of made.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Yeah, it's like we had real men back then, none
taking I've got the softest hands of anyone I know.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Chapter two, Making your Dog so jumping off of pugs.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Dog breeds are always a big topic of discussion. We
as a culture love to associate certain breeds with certain things,
so we think about like how pitbulls have such a
bad rap excel bullies And she has interesting analogy in
her book where she talks about how certain breeds have
(12:46):
certain tendencies and she compares that to addiction and humans.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
M I'm intrigued.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Yeah, I wonder if it was the best malogy to use.
But you know, people like to think that when you
get a pure bred dog, you're getting a kind of
guaranteed dog whose behavior is guaranteed. You know, if you
want a dog to herd your sheep, you're not going
to get yourself like a Maltese. Right, you're going to
get yourself a certain kind of dog who is bred
(13:19):
to herd sheep. But no dog comes out of the
womb hurting sheep. Right, They just have a propensity to
do types of things which to us looks like hurting sheep,
right to respond to human signaling, to be sensitive to
the motion of animals that are sort of sheep sized,
(13:40):
to want to kind of get them all in one place,
and importantly not to predate them, not to kill them.
So it has that tendency, you still have to shape
that tendency. So, for instance, if a sheep dog never
meets any sheep, they might do sort of hurting like
things with little kids or with people who enter your house,
(14:04):
but it's never going to look like sheep hurting, and
of course they'll never heard sheep, you know.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
And similarly with our.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Genetic tendencies, we might have tendencies towards certain behaviors, but
if you're never exposed to any instances of that behavior,
that tendency won't manifest in the way it will somebody
else who is exposed to it. Right, it does have
an opportunity to take lots of an addictive substance. That
(14:30):
person if they have a tendency to addiction, is more
likely to become addicted to the substance. But if they
never have the exposure, they're not gonna become addicted. For
dogs like pitbulls, you know, people think, well, that dog
is bred to be aggressive by the way. It's pitbulls now,
But it used to be Doberman pincher, used to be Rottweilers,
(14:52):
used to be German shepherds, right. We just that says
something about us, not about the dogs. And what it
says about us is that we have used these dogs
in ways which are occasionally aggressive, and therefore the whole
breed gets marked as being aggressive. But around the turn
of the twentieth century, piples were nannies for people's kids.
(15:16):
They were seen as gentle, sweet dogs. The dog hasn't
changed that much.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I think we've both done the DNA test for our dogs.
Speaker 5 (15:22):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
In her books she has this a footnote that's basically
calling out the accuracy of these tests. Sounds a bit
word because these tests are not exactly cheap. It's spent
a little bit of money on it. So did I
waste my money getting a DNA test for my dog?
And then like oh, I know he's some sort of shepherd.
Makes I want to see what all the other breeds are. Well.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
I wrote it in two thousand and seven, it came
out in two thousand and nine. I'm revising it now,
and the DNA tests have advanced considerably since that's I
don't think you wasted your money, But it depends on
what you wanted with that. If you have a very
unusual breed or a dog where nobody else with that
(16:05):
dog has submitted their dog for DNA analysis, you probably
wouldn't get as a result on your dog that it
is that breed. They're just looking at similarities of the
genome to other breeds they have on file, and so
even you if you get your result and it's like
a shepherd pity mix, let's say I don't know correctly, yeah,
(16:29):
And then what it's saying is like, you know, some
of the genome is very close to shepherds, other shepherds.
We have on file people who say they have a
German Shepherd or a Dutch shepherd, and some of the
genome is close to these other dogs genomes. So we
have on file where we know it's a Staffordshire bull
Terrier or some other dog which we call a pity,
(16:51):
and it's similar in that way. But that doesn't mean
that the dad of your or the mom was a
pity and the dad was a.
Speaker 6 (16:59):
Shepherd, right.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
It means that, like, overall they're closely. They're like they've
got cousins, they got similar to aunts and uncles, and right,
it's most similar.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
To So she is like, you should think about these
tests as like ancestry dot com and not like paternity tests.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Chapter three, Training Dogs, there is this world of dog
TikTok that is really upset with the current way that
people treat dogs. They don't like this new what they
call gentle parenting of dogs. Right, they're like, why you
shouldn't let your dog in your bed. You gotta be
the alpha the pack. You don't show the dog whose
boss dog is gonna come for you exactly. But she
(17:40):
says that this you need to be alpha thing is
actually based on a huge misconception with wolves.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
I wrote the book like over fifteen years ago, and
this idea is still really sticky idea. It came from
where it was popularized by Sasar Milan.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
When good dogs go bad, there's one man who's their
best friend sees you a line.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
No dog is too much for me to handle.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Who talks about that as part of his philosophy that
wolves live impacts where there's an alpha, and so again
looking at natural behavior of relatives, which makes sense in
some cases for some reasons, and saying like, so in
your pack, in your house, you have to be the
alpha of your dog.
Speaker 6 (18:28):
Otherwise they al sort of be the alpha of you.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Unfortunately, it's super wrong. And what's wrong is, you know,
at the time, that's how we thought wolf packs lived.
That's because it was hard to study wolves in the
wild because we didn't This was pre GPS, et cetera.
So people studying wolves studied captive wolves, and in particular,
a guy named Schenkel studied a bunch of captive wolves
(18:51):
who were just coincidentally, I guess, mostly like teenage male wolves,
and they were captive, and they were in a small enclosure.
And what he observed through looking at their behavior is
that they formed a little bit of a dominance hierarchy
where there were some wolves who called them the alphas,
who would eat first right, who'd get the first new resource, etc.
Could sleep where they wanted, et cetera. And then there
(19:14):
were other wolves who kind of like tried to fight
them for that position when they were prepared, sort of
the beta wolves.
Speaker 6 (19:21):
So it was a power struggle, is what he saw.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
But as it turned out, when people started actually studying
wolves in the wild, they observed that actually wolves live
in family packs. They're not a bunch of teenage boys
hanging out together in a small space. Instead, they're families,
which is great actually makes dogs. It easy for dogs
to kind of fit in our family where if there
is an alpha, that's just the parents. Yeah, I mean
(19:46):
parents aren't alphas in a way. They sort of control,
but they don't control through violence, and the young are
not trying to overtake the parents ever, right, Like the
parent's control is about like keeping the family unit together. There,
the parents' control is because they know how things go.
So wolves live in family units with their young and
(20:09):
maybe they're young's young and there is no dominance hierarchy
that the way that people are thinking. So the alpha
tack idea that then we should bring this antiquated idea
of wolf behavior into our living with dogs is bananas
at best, it's just a weird idea. At worst, it's
(20:29):
like just cruel and is leading to this ridiculous relationship
with your dog where you're punishing them for no reason.
So it's going to create a fear based relationship. So, yeah,
it's bad. I'm sorry to hear. It's still on TikTok
making the sounds.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah it is, But I feel like it's evolving right
in like I think about even now, like the way
arm raising my dog versus like growing up in a
way like my dad talk about the family dog right
like you're saying for me, it's more so like how
do I keep you safe and under control? But there
is still this this sect of people basically being like
(21:11):
if you don't dominate your dog, your dog will dominate you.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Yeah, which has never happened. Dogs don't dominate people. Dogs
out of fear or fright or excitement. My bite might
try to grab food out of your hand. Whatever, it's
not dominating.
Speaker 8 (21:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
They're not ready to take control the household, take on
the taxes, the car. They're not trying to do that stuff.
They are trying to understand how to live in a
human household. And it's not obvious to dogs. There are
a whole other species. I find it super paradoxical that
we want to live with dogs because they are not human, right,
(21:48):
because they are different, they act differently, and then for
some reason we don't want to let them be dogs.
Speaker 6 (21:53):
Yeah, we're worried about them being dogs. There is a
balance to be struck.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
As you're saying, you still have to if you're living
in dogs around other people, you still have to make
sure they don't injure other people. So there's something, there's
some kind of control or managing or just understanding that
you need to impart to them. But it's not. You
don't need to dominate them. They're not going to dominate you.
(22:21):
And that's a shame.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
That's really interesting. This was kind of a foundational like
structure of Caesar millions like teachings and that yeah show.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
It was all about being the alpha and showing the dogs. Look,
he got results, right, And I don't even think she
would deny that he got results, but I think, yeah,
she's saying, it's like it's fear based results, right, Like
the dog is only doing the thing because it is
afraid of you. It is not doing the thing because
it thinks it's the right thing to do. Chapter four,
(22:57):
The sensus so dogs have this really cool way of breathing.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Their whole anatomy is constructed to kind of enable them
to smell the world.
Speaker 6 (23:10):
They're really good sniffers.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
They can sniff like seven times a second, whereas if
we do that, we would hyperventilate. When you get a
smell in your nose and you want to get rid
of it, we know how to do that. You like,
exhale the smell, like you sort of shoot it at
your nose as best you can. But if dogs, if
they're seeing the world through smell, they don't want to
shoot that image out of their.
Speaker 8 (23:32):
Nose, right, so they actually exhale through the side slits
of their nose, those little slits which you can visibly
see on your dog, and that allows them to kind
of continue to let odors come in through the main banarees,
the main nostril.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So that's why they're better at following sense and exacts.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
And she talks about it in terms of like thinking
about us blinking be sort of like.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
With vision, if you needed to take these really long blinks,
you know, as long as your eyes were open, you
need to blink them shut. We don't we blink very briefly.
Why because closing our eyes disappears the world suddenly. For them,
sending odors out their nose means they're not getting any
information about the smells of the world. So they have
(24:24):
this continual stream and they exhale separately, and that exhale
actually also sort of stirs up odors, more odors maybe
from the grounds that could be rushed into their nose.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
So that's very cool.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
So study show that trained dogs can actually smell out
cancer at pretty high rates. Wow, cancer, Yeah, if they're training,
you know, obviously there have to be trained to know what
cancer smells like.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
I didn't know cancer had a smell.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
It does dogs, and dogs are pretty good at detecting it.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
I guess if they can smell drugs, why not?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah? When cancer cancer something probably more helpful exactly.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Yeah, stop finding my drugs.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
And their whole anatomy is really constructed to allow them
to smell more richly than we do. Which is not
to say they don't have great vision as well. Their
vision is fine. They have two color vision.
Speaker 7 (25:16):
They're not color blind.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
They are not color blind. What they're not color blindsion?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
How does their vision compare to ours?
Speaker 3 (25:30):
They can have a wider peripheral field than we do,
so they can see more out of the sides. The
science clearly shows that they have two color vision, sort
of like maybe like what it's like for us at dusk,
you know, when the bright colors of outdoors become just
sort of muted, and they actually have a faster flicker
fusion rate than we do, which means like the rate
(25:51):
at which their eyes turn the series of snapshots that
we're taking all the time into the feeling of smooth motion.
And the result of that is that they can notice
things that flicker because they're designed for human eyes, like
fluorescent lights, they notice them flickering. So their perceptual world,
between the smell and the vision, just getting a glimpse
(26:14):
at that, you start to see like, oh yeah, they're
living in like a slightly parallel universe to ours. What
they're going to notice and be concerned with and care
about is going to be a little different than us
staring at our screens, right, things like that. That's you know,
some dogs will look at a screen, but that's not
going to be mostly engaging to them. Now, if there
(26:36):
were an odor screen and odors were shooting out of there,
you know, thumbs up.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
The kind of frame rate thing is interesting.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah, I wonder if someone has made a you know,
how they have for dogs. There's like a channel it's
like TV for dogs, or there's some YouTube. I wonder
if they changed the frame rate on it.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
I mean, yeah, they better if if they're with it.
Speaker 5 (26:58):
Yeah, Oh I hope. So over there for the dog's sick,
I mean, I hate seeing you know, when you go
to some people's houses and they have emotions smoothing on
watching a regular movie or something.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Does your dog watch TV?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Not really? If there's a certain noise, he'll look over,
like crying babies, what about dog dogs barking? He'll look
at and try to turn his head. At chapter five,
what a dog knows? All right, So now this takes
us to a little segment I'm gonna call is Ali racist?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Oh yeah, wow, let's get to it.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Okay, my ex is a white lady, and there will
be times where I take Ali to the park and
he'll see a white woman walking and he'll sprint over
to that person, get kind of close, and then it
seems like, oh, he sort of realizes, oh, this is
not Sarah, this is not who I think it is.
(27:55):
And then he started just walks away Sarah. When she
walks Ali, she says he will do the same thing
if he sees like a black guy walking with sort
of longer hair. And initially I was like, oh, our
dogs to some of the grey I don't want to
say racist, but you know, like they have sort of like, yeah,
these are exactly these associations. But then you talk a
(28:17):
bit about you know, like people from the military when
they come home after being gone for a long time,
how it usually takes the dog like a second or
two to recognize them. Hen talk to why that is.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yeah, yeah, so it's not they aren't using vision, right,
So there are some visual cues that that might be Sarah,
or when Ali's with Sarah, that might be you. Some
visual clues include skin color, body shape, or size, like
also where you might expect to see somebody or not. Right,
All of those things are clues. But then on closer examination,
(28:53):
they really identify you by your smell.
Speaker 6 (28:56):
I mean, they know us by her smell. That's the ultimate.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
If somebody looked just like me but smell different, they
wouldn't think it's me. They smell just like me but
look a little different. I think that would give them
a little bit of pause, but they would kind of
believe it's me, right, So what's happening is they're always
rushing over to that white lady and being like yes,
and then like, oh no, it does not smell like Sarah.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, I mean I believe it. I mean Rizzo.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
I've been walked by and like there'll be like some
white woman getting out of an uber or something on
a black and he's like jumping.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
It's like.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
Or like it's like I'm walking him, but then some
short white guy walks by and he's jumping on it.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
It's like, look, like, who do you think is walking
right now?
Speaker 2 (29:43):
He's like there's two of you. Yes, you're a twin.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
So you know they're a little bit racist, but they're
also really good at reading like human behavior, right, Like
if dogs notice something is off, they really really like
tune into that. Alie gets to me into trouble. This
a lot. If I'm walking around the neighborhood and someone's
acting a bit off, like he'll just stop and stare
(30:12):
and I'm like come on, come on, come on, and
it's like, yeah, we are so good at like noticing
the thing and like keeping it moving. And like dogs like, yeah,
when they notice the thing, it's like he just zeros
in on it. Like why are they so attuned to
I guess things that like are even just a little bit,
like even someone walking with like a limp, right, Like
(30:35):
that's something that he picks up on immediately totally.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, you know, I think kids are like this too
for a similar reason, Like they're not in our culture
like you just you just said, we see somebody who's
acting a little aberrant, like we move a little bit away,
or we don't stare right at them. We don't want
to provoke that person or make them feel uncomfortable or
whatever it is. And the dog doesn't have any of
(31:00):
that sensibility, right, so instead the dog, you know, stares
trying to get more information. We think it's rude. They're
just trying to understand what that creature is doing.
Speaker 5 (31:15):
Right?
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Is that a threat? Is that something you know I
should alert you to. They might start barking right like hey, look, hey, look,
And you're like I'm trying not to look, and I'm like, hey, look.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
You've probably seen there's this dog uses buttons to communicate.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Oh yeah, I've seen this.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I've been following us.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
For a long time to communicate with achievements, allegedly. Allegedly.
I have very strong opinions about this. I have no
science to back it up, but I have very strong opinions.
So one of the big dogs that does this is
Bunny on TikTok. I trust that Bunny uses the buttons
to say, I want to eat, I want to go outside.
(32:01):
Basic commands. Right, All of our dogs do this to something.
They're not pressing buttons.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
But they do it to you when you're just looking
at you.
Speaker 7 (32:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Ali does the thing now where when he wants a treat,
he'll literally just sit by where.
Speaker 7 (32:15):
The treats are.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, and I know that means he wants to treat.
That's how he's communicating with it. Where Bunny starts to
lose me is they got Bunny talking about like I'm
depressed and my antidepressants.
Speaker 6 (32:34):
You're big sad? Why because dad?
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Bye?
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Are you big sad?
Speaker 6 (32:40):
Because Dad?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
By this is tough to watch.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Okayd do medicine.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
I can only speak for my dog, but my dog
is not having thoughts. I look at those eyes and
there's there's not a lot going on here.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
How are you communicating to the dog that you're depressed.
How are you communicating to the dog that if you
take this thing, it's going to make you feel better.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Yeah, what people are hopeful about with the buttons is
that their dogs are saying something they can't say otherwise.
But it's it's not scientific to say that they are, Like,
we have no way of confirming or denying it. That's
that's the thing. It's just like every other kind of
anthropomorphism we've made.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
So since we did this interview, a new study came out,
with the big headline being a study indicates that some
dogs are able to express themselves by pressing buttons in
two or more word combinations that are neither random nor accidental.
So I followed up with Alexandra on this and she
was a bit skeptical. She said, it seems to show
(33:52):
that at a population level, so not individual dogs doing this,
but the whole group, certain two word phrases happen more
often it would be expected by chance. She also said,
if the buttons are meaningful for the dogs, you know
they're using them non randomly to actually say things, then
you would expect that they would use them in all cases,
(34:13):
non randomly, not randomly in some cases and non randomly
in others. So she said it also didn't really seem
to show that the dogs comprehended at the level at
least we think of comprehension, because some of the phrases
just didn't really make sense. So one of the top
phrases is go outside plus other and help plus other.
(34:38):
Those don't really make any sense. And then sort of
like the last caveat or red flag that she gave
is that this was self reported, which she said is
just like why be frouled upon in behavioral science, there's
just too much human psychology that lets us remember the
things we want to and discount the things we don't
(34:59):
want to.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
I think that many dogs understand about six to ten words,
and that's only if you use them really clearly in
very specific cases. Right. They don't obviously speak of vocal language,
you know, they communicate in other ways, but they're flexible
enough so that they can understand a couple of words
(35:22):
if you use them carefully in the same way over time. Right.
Speaker 6 (35:26):
We don't usually tend to do that.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Oh, we say, I say to my dog, you know,
do you want to go for a walk? Do you
want to go outside? Should we go outside, where's your leash?
I'll say all sorts of things which mean the same
thing to me, but unless I say them clearly to
the dog, it's going to take a long time for
them to learn what those mean. But now I've said
do you want to go for a walk enough that
(35:49):
if I say that in any context, they know what
I mean. So you can't say that. You have to
spell it out. Yeah, like you're talking to somebody else
about it.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
So what is that?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
That's some kind of language understanding, But it's not the
same as our kind of language understanding, right, It's like
word learning. They've learned words like I've learned that his
tail wag mean means a different thing if it's a
high tail wag than a low tail wag.
Speaker 6 (36:13):
Like I can speak tail, but that doesn't mean I'm
a dog.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Right.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
And because they can use they can learn some words.
If we use them deliberately in the same way, that
doesn't mean that they speak our language. Now, there are
some of these amazing dogs word learning dogs like Chaser.
Speaker 7 (36:32):
Chaser walk up beloved six year old border colleague of
psychology professor John Pilly Good Girl. John has taught Chaser
to ten an extremely large, if unconventional herd of a
thousand toys, and she knows the name of every single
one of these A hope. I find this hard to believe,
so I test Chaser's memory with a random sampling. Chaser
(36:54):
find inky. Well, she got one right.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
I mean, she was so cool and her owner, John Pilley,
could ask her to like get a toy or touch
it or do different things with these toys, right, But
he spent hours every day playing with her and teaching
her these words.
Speaker 6 (37:18):
She seemed to love it. But she's unusual.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
There aren't a lot of dogs like that, and there
aren't a lot of people that deal with their dogs
like that. They're just really different communicative specimen. But it
doesn't mean that they don't understand any things that we say,
and it doesn't mean they don't have a rich communicative vocabulary.
It's just made up of other types of sounds and behaviors.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
All right, We're gonna take one more break and then
finally get an answer to our question. Chapter six, the question.
Let's get to our big question. Our city dogs less
(37:59):
happy than suburban dogs.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
So I'm a scientist, so I have a lot of
trouble giving black and white answers. If I had to
give a black and white answer, I mean that point
is there's no one kind of suburban dog. There's no
one kind of city dog. And I don't know Ali,
so I don't know where he thrives. But if I
had to give a black and white answer, I would say,
(38:24):
if he's used to the city, he wouldn't be happy
in the suburbs. And that's because the stimulation in the
city is like thrilling for some dogs too much, right,
But I think for a lot of dogs it is
a great environment, and for a reason you alluded to,
which is that you need to be intentional about his life.
(38:48):
When you put a dog in the yard, what do
you think happens in the yard? I mean, if you
ever looked out in the yard, if you're living in
your suburban home, some dogs are sitting there and happily
watching squirrels or whatever.
Speaker 6 (39:01):
No dog is just.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Running around all day, running around and excited and thrilled
by themselves. They are by themselves, they're trying to find
something to do. You've given them a bigger space than
a living room or a crate, and there might be
more going on outside than the living room of the crate,
but it's still just by themselves.
Speaker 6 (39:23):
In the city, we're much more.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
Conscious of leaving them by themselves, and we do it
a lot less. We find them other dogs to play with,
we go to off leash hours, we make sure that
we're not going to be gone too long because we
realize that we're their social company. We think about when
they need to pee, and we take them out for that,
you know. So we're so much more intentional with respect
(39:48):
to the dog that it turns out, I think a
lot of their life is really improved for it. They
also wind up having a lot more dog interactions. Suburban
dog sometimes we'll have zero dog interactions. They might bark
at a dog who passes by who's being walked by,
but they might never really interact with them with their dog.
(40:10):
And I can't imagine that being a great dog life
under any circumstances. And dogs are social creatures, social with
dogs or social with people, or both, and no dog
wants to be left alone most of its life, whether
it's in an apartment or in a yard. So I
don't I mean, I think people talk to me all
(40:31):
the time about how they feel guilt about leaving their
dogs alone. And I don't say that they should feel guilt,
but I'm glad that they're thinking about their dog's experience, because, yeah,
they're captive to our situation. Now, a better scenario for
the dog, in some ways might be when they can
(40:51):
run free. Right Like when I was a kid, we
let our dogs out at night. We just let them
out of the house. Lived in a kind of suburban
area where I guess it wasn't hugely populated. For some reason,
we didn't think it was dangerous. Now I would never
do that. I would never do it, But we did
(41:12):
allow my dog to have his own experiences, un controlled
by a leash, making decisions and choices. He came back
when he wanted to come back, except for the time
we sit by car and it took him a long
time to get back, And that's why we don't do that.
But you know, he got to make choices and do
(41:32):
what he wanted to do and cavort and run or sit,
you know, and the world was his oyster. That feels
like the ideal scenario for dogs. Now, it's not safe.
I don't think we should do that. But then just
putting them in a yard and assuming that that satisfies
(41:52):
the same impulse, it doesn't satisfy the same impulse. I
feel really sad for lots of suburban dogs. I see them,
you know, in a dog kennel or on a long lead,
or just left outside, and mostly they're just hugging the
fence or looking right at the door, waiting to go in,
or waiting for somebody to go by so they can
(42:14):
maybe have an interaction. That's that's no way to live
a life.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
So what I hear you saying is both, you know,
like you're saying like it's like a when you're talking
to a doctor. It's like, I don't know what your
particular situation is, right, Like, I think Ali actually to
your point, I think he does enjoy the stimuli of
the city. He loves being outside and seeing all his
dog friends, and you know, you can just tell he's excited.
(42:44):
But then it's also, like you're saying, just living in
one place or another does not determine how good of
a dog owner you are. Like, just simply being in
the suburbs doesn't mean your dog is going to live
a better life if you're not actually actively doing anything
to make sure that your dog is being stimulated outside
of like, all right, you're in the backyard. Cool, like
now you're inside?
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think no dog.
Speaker 6 (43:08):
You know, all dogs are different.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
They're fearful, they're excited by stimuli, really different dogs. Some
really like playing with other dogs. Some just really want
to be around their people all the time. You know,
are you allowing them to do that in both these cases?
And how much do the people think about what the
dogs need and want and what they're doing right now?
Speaker 6 (43:27):
You know, most people who.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Live in in city with a dog, if you said,
right now, where's your dog, they know the dog is
like right there, and they know when they're going to
take their dog out again, they're thinking about it. If
the good dog people in the suburbs, you know, who
knows where the dog is. You know, it's a different
type of connection with your dog, and it's a different
type of responsibility for your dog.
Speaker 6 (43:50):
And for you know, for the two I live with
two dogs right now. It's another good example.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
They both love it when we go into a rural
area and there's like a fenced area where they can
just hang out. But most of the time they want
to just be with us on the couch. Right, And
one of the dogs wants to have a ball tossed
again and again. Yeah, you know, the yard doesn't toss
the ball, right, I have to be there tossing the ball, right.
(44:19):
And so a yard is not a satisfaction. It's just
the way that we grew up. And if you had
asked me this question one hundred years ago, the question
would have been like, you know, should we have dogs
wandering through city streets or you know, should we keep
(44:40):
them only in kennels? And like, neither of those is
perfect for every dog either, right, But it's just very
locally culturally. This is the kind of dichotomy that we
see now. People love to say dogs in cities, I
don't have a good life. Dogs lives in the city
can be excellent, just great, full of other dogs, full
(45:01):
of a lot of attention from people, smells, imagine the smells.
Speaker 6 (45:05):
And on the streets of New York City.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
I mean it's delicious, right, So it has its own
set of stimuli with a good dog person, it's a
great scenario.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Well, a lot of that surprised me, even I'm even
questioning my initial reaction to some of those tiktoks we
were seeing, which is that Like I'm like, oh, this
dog clearly prefers this environment. But as she was saying,
it just wasn't used to it. It's excited about something different, exploring,
(45:37):
running around a little bit, and then maybe the next
TikTok taking them a week later, it's just fucking bored sitting.
Speaker 5 (45:45):
Well yeah, well, I mean in some ways it made
me feel better, like at least I am giving my
dog a lot of attention. Yeah, my dog personally, I know,
would prefer a quieter place. Yeah, but you know, at
least it's like, well, it.
Speaker 4 (45:57):
Doesn't mean you're ruining his life.
Speaker 5 (45:59):
Yeah, I don't think he's not as miserable as he
could be.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Well you can have riz in the suburbs and not
be as attentive and yeah exactly. Yeah, you know, it
could go to any other direction right where he could be.
You know, he would have been happy if he was
in the city.
Speaker 5 (46:19):
Then he's getting antsy and stuff because we're not doing much.
I will say, when we were in Virginia, even like
by you know, we were there for a little over
a week. At a certain point, maybe five days in,
he went on on a walk and then was kind
of like, I'm done, I want to go back, even
though we were outside and with the other dogs and
all the stuff. So it's kind of like, once you
get used to something, it's not going to be as
(46:40):
fun anymore, you know.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah, in some ways.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
I guess this definitely made me feel better, obviously, but
I think the big my big takeaway from it was
like being intentional about how your dog is spending their time. Yeah, right,
Like you said, so much of what our dogs do
day to day is dependent on what we do with them.
(47:04):
And it's not even like she talks about in her book. Right,
it's not just taking your dog out for a walk.
It's letting your dog sometimes dictate where they want to walk. Right,
It's not always I want to walk this, where we're
going this, where we're doing this thing you're on a leash.
It's like maybe this walk, I'll let you lead, and
maybe like we don't need to get around the block.
We'll just going to be outside for thirty minutes, and
(47:27):
if you want to smell a tree for twenty of
those minutes, that's fine. We can stand here for twenty minutes.
So something that I'm since I've done this interview, been
considering is how can I do more things? Yeah, living
knowing that I'm living in the city, knowing that he
doesn't maybe have as much room to run around. How
can I have him explore in different ways, even if
(47:49):
it's just going for a walk. How can I be
more intentional about that stuff? Someone on TikTok said, like,
a good way to think about it is like being
outside with your dog and them smelling it's their TikTok.
Speaker 5 (48:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Yeah, so as annoyed as you are that they're sniffing
the tree for three minutes. Yeah, Like they can't watch TV,
they can't be on TikTok, their version of TikTok. So
you may think this is boring and you might want
to be like, let's go, But they are enjoying themselves
and you're the reason you're walking them is for them,
(48:24):
So just let them do today.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Yeah, it's funny to take the dog for a walk.
But then be like, yeah, and I.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Got a big dog and he got trust issues the dog.
I still miss you. I made mistakes the first time
and like the last time, sit you up with BM
That us just the sound.
Speaker 8 (48:48):
Line again.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Again.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Thing is produced by Manny Fidelle, Noah Friedman and me
Devin Joseph. The theme song is by Manny. This song
is Big Dog by my band Maurice and it's featuring
Kenyon Thing certain self and Alli's on this track, too Beautiful.
Our guest this week list Alexandra Horowitz. Check out her
(49:20):
book Inside of a Dog. We'll put a link to
it in the newsletter. No such thing not show.
Speaker 7 (49:26):
If you're a.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Fan of what we are doing, please give us five stars.
We got some haters giving one stars, so we gotta
get our ratings up. Our ratings are pretty good, but
it could be even higher, so five stars. We'll be
back next week with a new episode.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Oh one more thing that I I want to mention.
People say to me all the time, you can't have
a big dog in the city. You know, they can
run fast, they have a lot of energy, but they
also calm, yes, right, And what do they need like
a huge apartment to run around and all the time. No,
Allie's on the couch or whatever, right, Like, that's that's
(50:27):
what he's doing at. Little dogs, by contrast, are much
more high energy all the time. And it's our smaller
dog who's barking at things out the window, who's like, right,
on the edge of, you know, really excited. So I
feel like if you have a little dog, you shouldn't
live in the city. No, I'm not I'm not going
to come down that way.
I'm Manny, I'm Noah.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
And this is Devin, and this is no such thing.
A show where we settle our dumb arguments in yours
by actually doing the research. On today's episode, are suburban
dogs happier than city dogs.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
I'm a scientist, so I have a lot of trouble
giving black and white answers. But if I had to
give a black and white answer, I would say.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
No, there's no no such thing, no such thing, such thing.
Speaker 5 (00:38):
Maybe you'll make them back.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Hey, uh, this is Devin. Thought this would be a
good way to start this week's episode. I'm not walking
my dog, Allie. I guess this episode this week is
kind of about something I've been grappling with. When I
first moved to the city, I was someone who was
(01:04):
pretty dead set on not having a dog in the city.
I thought it was really sad to see dogs in
a city, you know, washing him just like poop on
the sidewalk. I thought, like, there's no place for them
to really run around. They don't have enough space. The
apartments are way too small. But now it's been going
(01:26):
on five years now that I myself have owned the
dog in the city, and I think, you know, COVID
was a pretty good time for me to put aside
all these preconceived notions I had about dogs in the
city because I was bored in the house. But now
(01:49):
I'm starting to think about it, if that was a
selfish choice, and if I'm really doing the right thing.
I have my dog ally live in the city versus
like being in a suburbs, are on a farm somewhere.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
What made you think about this now?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
So we're recording this right after the holidays, and around
the holidays, you know a lot of people go home
and bring their dogs with them. So I've been seeing
all these tiktoks. So I'll share this in a group
and I'll have you guys describe them. But at a
top level, I'll say they these tiktoks are people documenting
(02:32):
their city dogs going to the suburbs or let's say
a more rural area. This is all right.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
The onscreen text says, when you bring your dog from
your apartment to your parents' house for the holidays, and
the dog is kind of running around the house, obviously
very excited, wagging its tape, perhaps excited at the amount
of space that's in there.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's one let's put that into one bucket of videos.
The second bucket of videos I'm seeing are people who
are moving from the city to the suburbs a Morboro
area lift their dogs. So let me say, you just TikTok.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
The caption says, introducing our apartment dog to his new
house and his very own backyard.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And it is really sweet.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
You can clearly tell that this dog is so happy
about the green, the greenery h in the space and
just being able to sprint. Like there are no situations
in New York that I've seen where a dog can
just sprint unless it's at a park.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, all flee showers, right, It's only a certain amount of.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Time at someone's apartment, you cannot. A dog cannot sprint
because it will immediately just be at the other end
of it.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
We're not in that text bragget where you could sprint
through the apartment oli tries. But so yeah, this stuff has,
you know, has me thinking, I'm at the point of
my life where I am in no rush to leave
the city. I think I could live the rest of
my life living in the city. But I am starting
to think and be reminded of this hesitation I had
(04:16):
initially about having a dog in a city where it's like,
is he actually living a worst off life in the
city because I want a dog and I want to
live in the city. Would he be happier if I
moved to the suburbs?
Speaker 4 (04:30):
And I don't want to make you feel any worse,
but you got a big ass dog.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I have a huge dog. And that was another thing
that I said. I said, if I'm going to have
a dog in a city, he can't be big. But
Ali is eighty plus pounds, so he's a big boy.
And I do wonder if there's enough room for him here,
if he would enjoy life more if we were in
(04:56):
the suburbs. Now, Noah, you also have a dog here.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
Yeah, he he hates the city. He's smaller, he's about
thirty pounds. His name is Yeah, his name is riz Rizzo,
and we got him a couple of years ago now,
and yeah, he's never liked I think he likes us now,
but he hasn't liked the city. You can tell he
just doesn't like being outside. He's anxious and he's very
(05:20):
just like reactive to noise and stuff. Our man's on prozac.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Now, yeah, Rozak before which I.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Guess helps, but how do you identify that when the
dog needs to take that kind of.
Speaker 5 (05:32):
Medication, like it like he would basically if we take
him out on a walk, he would like shut down
and like try to just sit and like be really
freeze up. And this has helped with that, I think
at least. But then you know, we'll take him to
Julia's family in Virginia. They have a huge backdoor area
fenced in so he can take him off leash and
(05:53):
he runs around there and it's like obviously he's having
way more fight versus like yeah versus like we'll try
to take him to Prospect Park or something, but he's
so nervous. Just it's more like the walk over.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
There, it's ten to.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
Fifteen minutes, and he just gets so worked up in
there that then like we get there and he just
kind of wants to just go home. But when you
do take him to that backyard area, he's like running
around and doing kind of what we just saw in
the stick Tuck, like something clearly happier. Yeah, and just
like just more relaxed and exploring.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
So yeah, I guess the question is, knowing what we
know now, do we think suburban dogs on a wole
are happier than city dogs. Many will start with you
since you don't have any dog in this way.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
Okay, very nice, very nice. Yeah, just as someone who's
like so removed from this. To me, it's kind of
a no brainer, like, yeah, the big the more grass,
the more space, the dogs are probably gonna be happier.
But I don't own a dog. Maybe, but if I
had owned a dog, there'd be more new to it.
To me, it seems like definitely.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yeah, I you know, I think the reason why we're
here is because I think I agree.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
Another question for me is like, all right, if it
does turn out to be the case that suburb dogs
are way happier, at what point is it unethical to
have a dog in the city.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Wow. Yeah, it's a really good point not to.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Put my two dog owning friends on the spot that
I'm just saying, like I'm not I don't think dogs
can't be happy in the city, No, no, but are
they supposed to be here?
Speaker 5 (07:36):
My suspicion would be overall most dogs would be happier
with more space, more quiet. Generally, I like dogs are individual,
like not just be a dog oled lover, but it's
like they are different. So like some dogs can't even
see other dogs that they're gonna flip out, allowing that,
like every dog is an individual, I do wonder kind of,
all right, if all the basic needs are met, they're
(07:58):
getting attention, food, and every everything else that makes him happy.
I don't know, if you know, on a grander scale,
if one year in the city would be that much
worse necessarily than one year in the country, because like, I.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Don't think like my dog's miserable.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
I know if we moved next month, you know, upstate
or something and had a backyard, I would see different
behavior from him that I would interpret as being happier.
You know, Like, I don't know if someone could make
an argument that the city is better for any dog.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
After the break, we go inside the mind of a
dog and see what they see, smell.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And know.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I'm I'm Noah.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
This is Devin. So last time we talked, we were
trying to figure out if dogs in the city are
living worse off lives than dogs who live in the suburbs.
So as I was looking into people who study dogs,
there was one name that I kept seeing an article
after article.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
I'm Alexandra Horowitz. I'm a senior research fellow of the
Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So Alexandra is one of the leading dog cognition experts
in North America. If you read anything about dog cognition,
it's either a study she's done, or she's being asked
to interpret a study that someone else has done. And
she's also written an entire book on it. It's called
Inside of a Dog What Dogs See, Smell and Know.
(09:39):
So as I was reading through her book to prepare
for this interview, I quickly realized that I knew very
little about dogs. You know, I've grown up with dogs
my whole life, and I've thought I knew a lot
about them. So before we get to our answer, I
feel like it would be helpful for us to do
a little spark note version going through the book and
learning a bit more about what dogs see, smell.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
And now.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Chapter one, how wolves became Dogs.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
The story of domestication is actually constantly being evolved as
we have new or more powerful ways to study what
happened thousands of years ago. Our best guest now, based
on genetic evidence, is that dogs diverged from some ancestor wolf,
(10:32):
an ancestor of the current gray wolf that you see
in North America. Probably fourteen to twenty thousand years ago.
There were probably multiple domestication events, meaning different places at
different times, and maybe even repeatedly in a place where
there was a group of these proto dogs or like
(10:52):
friendly wolves who started to distinguish themselves from the other
wolves and started to affiliate with people, probably breeding intentional
breeding where I picked two dogs I like, and I
make them breed and I get a new dog that
has all the great features of those two dogs. That
didn't happen for quite a long time. It was basically
(11:14):
just self selection on the part of these wolves who
wanted to be around people, and also some self selection
of people who were agreeable to breeding around these wolves.
That started domestication, and eventually it became purebred breeding, and
now you have pugs.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
I'm having trouble imagining the first guy who was like,
I need this thing to be mine to a fucking wolf.
What was wrong with that person?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Wolves are kind of cute.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
No no, no, they look great. They look sick, But
I'm saying that I want one, but I wouldn't try
to do it.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
It's you know, survival of the fittest sort of thing
where you would be doing a lot more crazy up
in your life. So yes, you would feel maybe more
equipped to even tackle that sort of exactly point no
offense bottom.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
You know, you want to be able to go out
there and you're a different type of made.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Yeah, it's like we had real men back then, none
taking I've got the softest hands of anyone I know.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Chapter two, Making your Dog so jumping off of pugs.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Dog breeds are always a big topic of discussion. We
as a culture love to associate certain breeds with certain things,
so we think about like how pitbulls have such a
bad rap excel bullies And she has interesting analogy in
her book where she talks about how certain breeds have
(12:46):
certain tendencies and she compares that to addiction and humans.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
M I'm intrigued.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Yeah, I wonder if it was the best malogy to use.
But you know, people like to think that when you
get a pure bred dog, you're getting a kind of
guaranteed dog whose behavior is guaranteed. You know, if you
want a dog to herd your sheep, you're not going
to get yourself like a Maltese. Right, you're going to
get yourself a certain kind of dog who is bred
(13:19):
to herd sheep. But no dog comes out of the
womb hurting sheep. Right, They just have a propensity to
do types of things which to us looks like hurting sheep,
right to respond to human signaling, to be sensitive to
the motion of animals that are sort of sheep sized,
(13:40):
to want to kind of get them all in one place,
and importantly not to predate them, not to kill them.
So it has that tendency, you still have to shape
that tendency. So, for instance, if a sheep dog never
meets any sheep, they might do sort of hurting like
things with little kids or with people who enter your house,
(14:04):
but it's never going to look like sheep hurting, and
of course they'll never heard sheep, you know.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
And similarly with our.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Genetic tendencies, we might have tendencies towards certain behaviors, but
if you're never exposed to any instances of that behavior,
that tendency won't manifest in the way it will somebody
else who is exposed to it. Right, it does have
an opportunity to take lots of an addictive substance. That
(14:30):
person if they have a tendency to addiction, is more
likely to become addicted to the substance. But if they
never have the exposure, they're not gonna become addicted. For
dogs like pitbulls, you know, people think, well, that dog
is bred to be aggressive by the way. It's pitbulls now,
But it used to be Doberman pincher, used to be Rottweilers,
(14:52):
used to be German shepherds, right. We just that says
something about us, not about the dogs. And what it
says about us is that we have used these dogs
in ways which are occasionally aggressive, and therefore the whole
breed gets marked as being aggressive. But around the turn
of the twentieth century, piples were nannies for people's kids.
(15:16):
They were seen as gentle, sweet dogs. The dog hasn't
changed that much.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I think we've both done the DNA test for our dogs.
Speaker 5 (15:22):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
In her books she has this a footnote that's basically
calling out the accuracy of these tests. Sounds a bit
word because these tests are not exactly cheap. It's spent
a little bit of money on it. So did I
waste my money getting a DNA test for my dog?
And then like oh, I know he's some sort of shepherd.
Makes I want to see what all the other breeds are. Well.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
I wrote it in two thousand and seven, it came
out in two thousand and nine. I'm revising it now,
and the DNA tests have advanced considerably since that's I
don't think you wasted your money, But it depends on
what you wanted with that. If you have a very
unusual breed or a dog where nobody else with that
(16:05):
dog has submitted their dog for DNA analysis, you probably
wouldn't get as a result on your dog that it
is that breed. They're just looking at similarities of the
genome to other breeds they have on file, and so
even you if you get your result and it's like
a shepherd pity mix, let's say I don't know correctly, yeah,
(16:29):
And then what it's saying is like, you know, some
of the genome is very close to shepherds, other shepherds.
We have on file people who say they have a
German Shepherd or a Dutch shepherd, and some of the
genome is close to these other dogs genomes. So we
have on file where we know it's a Staffordshire bull
Terrier or some other dog which we call a pity,
(16:51):
and it's similar in that way. But that doesn't mean
that the dad of your or the mom was a
pity and the dad was a.
Speaker 6 (16:59):
Shepherd, right.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
It means that, like, overall they're closely. They're like they've
got cousins, they got similar to aunts and uncles, and right,
it's most similar.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
To So she is like, you should think about these
tests as like ancestry dot com and not like paternity tests.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Chapter three, Training Dogs, there is this world of dog
TikTok that is really upset with the current way that
people treat dogs. They don't like this new what they
call gentle parenting of dogs. Right, they're like, why you
shouldn't let your dog in your bed. You gotta be
the alpha the pack. You don't show the dog whose
boss dog is gonna come for you exactly. But she
(17:40):
says that this you need to be alpha thing is
actually based on a huge misconception with wolves.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
I wrote the book like over fifteen years ago, and
this idea is still really sticky idea. It came from
where it was popularized by Sasar Milan.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
When good dogs go bad, there's one man who's their
best friend sees you a line.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
No dog is too much for me to handle.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Who talks about that as part of his philosophy that
wolves live impacts where there's an alpha, and so again
looking at natural behavior of relatives, which makes sense in
some cases for some reasons, and saying like, so in
your pack, in your house, you have to be the
alpha of your dog.
Speaker 6 (18:28):
Otherwise they al sort of be the alpha of you.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Unfortunately, it's super wrong. And what's wrong is, you know,
at the time, that's how we thought wolf packs lived.
That's because it was hard to study wolves in the
wild because we didn't This was pre GPS, et cetera.
So people studying wolves studied captive wolves, and in particular,
a guy named Schenkel studied a bunch of captive wolves
(18:51):
who were just coincidentally, I guess, mostly like teenage male wolves,
and they were captive, and they were in a small enclosure.
And what he observed through looking at their behavior is
that they formed a little bit of a dominance hierarchy
where there were some wolves who called them the alphas,
who would eat first right, who'd get the first new resource, etc.
Could sleep where they wanted, et cetera. And then there
(19:14):
were other wolves who kind of like tried to fight
them for that position when they were prepared, sort of
the beta wolves.
Speaker 6 (19:21):
So it was a power struggle, is what he saw.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
But as it turned out, when people started actually studying
wolves in the wild, they observed that actually wolves live
in family packs. They're not a bunch of teenage boys
hanging out together in a small space. Instead, they're families,
which is great actually makes dogs. It easy for dogs
to kind of fit in our family where if there
is an alpha, that's just the parents. Yeah, I mean
(19:46):
parents aren't alphas in a way. They sort of control,
but they don't control through violence, and the young are
not trying to overtake the parents ever, right, Like the
parent's control is about like keeping the family unit together. There,
the parents' control is because they know how things go.
So wolves live in family units with their young and
(20:09):
maybe they're young's young and there is no dominance hierarchy
that the way that people are thinking. So the alpha
tack idea that then we should bring this antiquated idea
of wolf behavior into our living with dogs is bananas
at best, it's just a weird idea. At worst, it's
(20:29):
like just cruel and is leading to this ridiculous relationship
with your dog where you're punishing them for no reason.
So it's going to create a fear based relationship. So, yeah,
it's bad. I'm sorry to hear. It's still on TikTok
making the sounds.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah it is, But I feel like it's evolving right
in like I think about even now, like the way
arm raising my dog versus like growing up in a
way like my dad talk about the family dog right
like you're saying for me, it's more so like how
do I keep you safe and under control? But there
is still this this sect of people basically being like
(21:11):
if you don't dominate your dog, your dog will dominate you.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Yeah, which has never happened. Dogs don't dominate people. Dogs
out of fear or fright or excitement. My bite might
try to grab food out of your hand. Whatever, it's
not dominating.
Speaker 8 (21:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
They're not ready to take control the household, take on
the taxes, the car. They're not trying to do that stuff.
They are trying to understand how to live in a
human household. And it's not obvious to dogs. There are
a whole other species. I find it super paradoxical that
we want to live with dogs because they are not human, right,
(21:48):
because they are different, they act differently, and then for
some reason we don't want to let them be dogs.
Speaker 6 (21:53):
Yeah, we're worried about them being dogs. There is a
balance to be struck.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
As you're saying, you still have to if you're living
in dogs around other people, you still have to make
sure they don't injure other people. So there's something, there's
some kind of control or managing or just understanding that
you need to impart to them. But it's not. You
don't need to dominate them. They're not going to dominate you.
(22:21):
And that's a shame.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
That's really interesting. This was kind of a foundational like
structure of Caesar millions like teachings and that yeah show.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
It was all about being the alpha and showing the dogs. Look,
he got results, right, And I don't even think she
would deny that he got results, but I think, yeah,
she's saying, it's like it's fear based results, right, Like
the dog is only doing the thing because it is
afraid of you. It is not doing the thing because
it thinks it's the right thing to do. Chapter four,
(22:57):
The sensus so dogs have this really cool way of breathing.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Their whole anatomy is constructed to kind of enable them
to smell the world.
Speaker 6 (23:10):
They're really good sniffers.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
They can sniff like seven times a second, whereas if
we do that, we would hyperventilate. When you get a
smell in your nose and you want to get rid
of it, we know how to do that. You like,
exhale the smell, like you sort of shoot it at
your nose as best you can. But if dogs, if
they're seeing the world through smell, they don't want to
shoot that image out of their.
Speaker 8 (23:32):
Nose, right, so they actually exhale through the side slits
of their nose, those little slits which you can visibly
see on your dog, and that allows them to kind
of continue to let odors come in through the main banarees,
the main nostril.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So that's why they're better at following sense and exacts.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
And she talks about it in terms of like thinking
about us blinking be sort of like.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
With vision, if you needed to take these really long blinks,
you know, as long as your eyes were open, you
need to blink them shut. We don't we blink very briefly.
Why because closing our eyes disappears the world suddenly. For them,
sending odors out their nose means they're not getting any
information about the smells of the world. So they have
(24:24):
this continual stream and they exhale separately, and that exhale
actually also sort of stirs up odors, more odors maybe
from the grounds that could be rushed into their nose.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
So that's very cool.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
So study show that trained dogs can actually smell out
cancer at pretty high rates. Wow, cancer, Yeah, if they're training,
you know, obviously there have to be trained to know what
cancer smells like.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
I didn't know cancer had a smell.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
It does dogs, and dogs are pretty good at detecting it.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
I guess if they can smell drugs, why not?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah? When cancer cancer something probably more helpful exactly.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Yeah, stop finding my drugs.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
And their whole anatomy is really constructed to allow them
to smell more richly than we do. Which is not
to say they don't have great vision as well. Their
vision is fine. They have two color vision.
Speaker 7 (25:16):
They're not color blind.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
They are not color blind. What they're not color blindsion?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
How does their vision compare to ours?
Speaker 3 (25:30):
They can have a wider peripheral field than we do,
so they can see more out of the sides. The
science clearly shows that they have two color vision, sort
of like maybe like what it's like for us at dusk,
you know, when the bright colors of outdoors become just
sort of muted, and they actually have a faster flicker
fusion rate than we do, which means like the rate
(25:51):
at which their eyes turn the series of snapshots that
we're taking all the time into the feeling of smooth motion.
And the result of that is that they can notice
things that flicker because they're designed for human eyes, like
fluorescent lights, they notice them flickering. So their perceptual world,
between the smell and the vision, just getting a glimpse
(26:14):
at that, you start to see like, oh yeah, they're
living in like a slightly parallel universe to ours. What
they're going to notice and be concerned with and care
about is going to be a little different than us
staring at our screens, right, things like that. That's you know,
some dogs will look at a screen, but that's not
going to be mostly engaging to them. Now, if there
(26:36):
were an odor screen and odors were shooting out of there,
you know, thumbs up.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
The kind of frame rate thing is interesting.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah, I wonder if someone has made a you know,
how they have for dogs. There's like a channel it's
like TV for dogs, or there's some YouTube. I wonder
if they changed the frame rate on it.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
I mean, yeah, they better if if they're with it.
Speaker 5 (26:58):
Yeah, Oh I hope. So over there for the dog's sick,
I mean, I hate seeing you know, when you go
to some people's houses and they have emotions smoothing on
watching a regular movie or something.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Does your dog watch TV?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Not really? If there's a certain noise, he'll look over,
like crying babies, what about dog dogs barking? He'll look
at and try to turn his head. At chapter five,
what a dog knows? All right, So now this takes
us to a little segment I'm gonna call is Ali racist?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Oh yeah, wow, let's get to it.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Okay, my ex is a white lady, and there will
be times where I take Ali to the park and
he'll see a white woman walking and he'll sprint over
to that person, get kind of close, and then it
seems like, oh, he sort of realizes, oh, this is
not Sarah, this is not who I think it is.
(27:55):
And then he started just walks away Sarah. When she
walks Ali, she says he will do the same thing
if he sees like a black guy walking with sort
of longer hair. And initially I was like, oh, our
dogs to some of the grey I don't want to
say racist, but you know, like they have sort of like, yeah,
these are exactly these associations. But then you talk a
(28:17):
bit about you know, like people from the military when
they come home after being gone for a long time,
how it usually takes the dog like a second or
two to recognize them. Hen talk to why that is.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yeah, yeah, so it's not they aren't using vision, right,
So there are some visual cues that that might be Sarah,
or when Ali's with Sarah, that might be you. Some
visual clues include skin color, body shape, or size, like
also where you might expect to see somebody or not. Right,
All of those things are clues. But then on closer examination,
(28:53):
they really identify you by your smell.
Speaker 6 (28:56):
I mean, they know us by her smell. That's the ultimate.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
If somebody looked just like me but smell different, they
wouldn't think it's me. They smell just like me but
look a little different. I think that would give them
a little bit of pause, but they would kind of
believe it's me, right, So what's happening is they're always
rushing over to that white lady and being like yes,
and then like, oh no, it does not smell like Sarah.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, I mean I believe it. I mean Rizzo.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
I've been walked by and like there'll be like some
white woman getting out of an uber or something on
a black and he's like jumping.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
It's like.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
Or like it's like I'm walking him, but then some
short white guy walks by and he's jumping on it.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
It's like, look, like, who do you think is walking
right now?
Speaker 2 (29:43):
He's like there's two of you. Yes, you're a twin.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
So you know they're a little bit racist, but they're
also really good at reading like human behavior, right, Like
if dogs notice something is off, they really really like
tune into that. Alie gets to me into trouble. This
a lot. If I'm walking around the neighborhood and someone's
acting a bit off, like he'll just stop and stare
(30:12):
and I'm like come on, come on, come on, and
it's like, yeah, we are so good at like noticing
the thing and like keeping it moving. And like dogs like, yeah,
when they notice the thing, it's like he just zeros
in on it. Like why are they so attuned to
I guess things that like are even just a little bit,
like even someone walking with like a limp, right, Like
(30:35):
that's something that he picks up on immediately totally.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, you know, I think kids are like this too
for a similar reason, Like they're not in our culture
like you just you just said, we see somebody who's
acting a little aberrant, like we move a little bit away,
or we don't stare right at them. We don't want
to provoke that person or make them feel uncomfortable or
whatever it is. And the dog doesn't have any of
(31:00):
that sensibility, right, so instead the dog, you know, stares
trying to get more information. We think it's rude. They're
just trying to understand what that creature is doing.
Speaker 5 (31:15):
Right?
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Is that a threat? Is that something you know I
should alert you to. They might start barking right like hey, look, hey, look,
And you're like I'm trying not to look, and I'm like, hey, look.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
You've probably seen there's this dog uses buttons to communicate.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Oh yeah, I've seen this.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I've been following us.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
For a long time to communicate with achievements, allegedly. Allegedly.
I have very strong opinions about this. I have no
science to back it up, but I have very strong opinions.
So one of the big dogs that does this is
Bunny on TikTok. I trust that Bunny uses the buttons
to say, I want to eat, I want to go outside.
(32:01):
Basic commands. Right, All of our dogs do this to something.
They're not pressing buttons.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
But they do it to you when you're just looking
at you.
Speaker 7 (32:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Ali does the thing now where when he wants a treat,
he'll literally just sit by where.
Speaker 7 (32:15):
The treats are.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, and I know that means he wants to treat.
That's how he's communicating with it. Where Bunny starts to
lose me is they got Bunny talking about like I'm
depressed and my antidepressants.
Speaker 6 (32:34):
You're big sad? Why because dad?
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Bye?
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Are you big sad?
Speaker 6 (32:40):
Because Dad?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
By this is tough to watch.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Okayd do medicine.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
I can only speak for my dog, but my dog
is not having thoughts. I look at those eyes and
there's there's not a lot going on here.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
How are you communicating to the dog that you're depressed.
How are you communicating to the dog that if you
take this thing, it's going to make you feel better.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Yeah, what people are hopeful about with the buttons is
that their dogs are saying something they can't say otherwise.
But it's it's not scientific to say that they are, Like,
we have no way of confirming or denying it. That's
that's the thing. It's just like every other kind of
anthropomorphism we've made.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
So since we did this interview, a new study came out,
with the big headline being a study indicates that some
dogs are able to express themselves by pressing buttons in
two or more word combinations that are neither random nor accidental.
So I followed up with Alexandra on this and she
was a bit skeptical. She said, it seems to show
(33:52):
that at a population level, so not individual dogs doing this,
but the whole group, certain two word phrases happen more
often it would be expected by chance. She also said,
if the buttons are meaningful for the dogs, you know
they're using them non randomly to actually say things, then
you would expect that they would use them in all cases,
(34:13):
non randomly, not randomly in some cases and non randomly
in others. So she said it also didn't really seem
to show that the dogs comprehended at the level at
least we think of comprehension, because some of the phrases
just didn't really make sense. So one of the top
phrases is go outside plus other and help plus other.
(34:38):
Those don't really make any sense. And then sort of
like the last caveat or red flag that she gave
is that this was self reported, which she said is
just like why be frouled upon in behavioral science, there's
just too much human psychology that lets us remember the
things we want to and discount the things we don't
(34:59):
want to.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
I think that many dogs understand about six to ten words,
and that's only if you use them really clearly in
very specific cases. Right. They don't obviously speak of vocal language,
you know, they communicate in other ways, but they're flexible
enough so that they can understand a couple of words
(35:22):
if you use them carefully in the same way over time. Right.
Speaker 6 (35:26):
We don't usually tend to do that.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Oh, we say, I say to my dog, you know,
do you want to go for a walk? Do you
want to go outside? Should we go outside, where's your leash?
I'll say all sorts of things which mean the same
thing to me, but unless I say them clearly to
the dog, it's going to take a long time for
them to learn what those mean. But now I've said
do you want to go for a walk enough that
(35:49):
if I say that in any context, they know what
I mean. So you can't say that. You have to
spell it out. Yeah, like you're talking to somebody else
about it.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
So what is that?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
That's some kind of language understanding, But it's not the
same as our kind of language understanding, right, It's like
word learning. They've learned words like I've learned that his
tail wag mean means a different thing if it's a
high tail wag than a low tail wag.
Speaker 6 (36:13):
Like I can speak tail, but that doesn't mean I'm
a dog.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Right.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
And because they can use they can learn some words.
If we use them deliberately in the same way, that
doesn't mean that they speak our language. Now, there are
some of these amazing dogs word learning dogs like Chaser.
Speaker 7 (36:32):
Chaser walk up beloved six year old border colleague of
psychology professor John Pilly Good Girl. John has taught Chaser
to ten an extremely large, if unconventional herd of a
thousand toys, and she knows the name of every single
one of these A hope. I find this hard to believe,
so I test Chaser's memory with a random sampling. Chaser
(36:54):
find inky. Well, she got one right.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
I mean, she was so cool and her owner, John Pilley,
could ask her to like get a toy or touch
it or do different things with these toys, right, But
he spent hours every day playing with her and teaching
her these words.
Speaker 6 (37:18):
She seemed to love it. But she's unusual.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
There aren't a lot of dogs like that, and there
aren't a lot of people that deal with their dogs
like that. They're just really different communicative specimen. But it
doesn't mean that they don't understand any things that we say,
and it doesn't mean they don't have a rich communicative vocabulary.
It's just made up of other types of sounds and behaviors.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
All right, We're gonna take one more break and then
finally get an answer to our question. Chapter six, the question.
Let's get to our big question. Our city dogs less
(37:59):
happy than suburban dogs.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
So I'm a scientist, so I have a lot of
trouble giving black and white answers. If I had to
give a black and white answer, I mean that point
is there's no one kind of suburban dog. There's no
one kind of city dog. And I don't know Ali,
so I don't know where he thrives. But if I
had to give a black and white answer, I would say,
(38:24):
if he's used to the city, he wouldn't be happy
in the suburbs. And that's because the stimulation in the
city is like thrilling for some dogs too much, right,
But I think for a lot of dogs it is
a great environment, and for a reason you alluded to,
which is that you need to be intentional about his life.
(38:48):
When you put a dog in the yard, what do
you think happens in the yard? I mean, if you
ever looked out in the yard, if you're living in
your suburban home, some dogs are sitting there and happily
watching squirrels or whatever.
Speaker 6 (39:01):
No dog is just.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Running around all day, running around and excited and thrilled
by themselves. They are by themselves, they're trying to find
something to do. You've given them a bigger space than
a living room or a crate, and there might be
more going on outside than the living room of the crate,
but it's still just by themselves.
Speaker 6 (39:23):
In the city, we're much more.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
Conscious of leaving them by themselves, and we do it
a lot less. We find them other dogs to play with,
we go to off leash hours, we make sure that
we're not going to be gone too long because we
realize that we're their social company. We think about when
they need to pee, and we take them out for that,
you know. So we're so much more intentional with respect
(39:48):
to the dog that it turns out, I think a
lot of their life is really improved for it. They
also wind up having a lot more dog interactions. Suburban
dog sometimes we'll have zero dog interactions. They might bark
at a dog who passes by who's being walked by,
but they might never really interact with them with their dog.
(40:10):
And I can't imagine that being a great dog life
under any circumstances. And dogs are social creatures, social with
dogs or social with people, or both, and no dog
wants to be left alone most of its life, whether
it's in an apartment or in a yard. So I
don't I mean, I think people talk to me all
(40:31):
the time about how they feel guilt about leaving their
dogs alone. And I don't say that they should feel guilt,
but I'm glad that they're thinking about their dog's experience, because, yeah,
they're captive to our situation. Now, a better scenario for
the dog, in some ways might be when they can
(40:51):
run free. Right Like when I was a kid, we
let our dogs out at night. We just let them
out of the house. Lived in a kind of suburban
area where I guess it wasn't hugely populated. For some reason,
we didn't think it was dangerous. Now I would never
do that. I would never do it, But we did
(41:12):
allow my dog to have his own experiences, un controlled
by a leash, making decisions and choices. He came back
when he wanted to come back, except for the time
we sit by car and it took him a long
time to get back, And that's why we don't do that.
But you know, he got to make choices and do
(41:32):
what he wanted to do and cavort and run or sit,
you know, and the world was his oyster. That feels
like the ideal scenario for dogs. Now, it's not safe.
I don't think we should do that. But then just
putting them in a yard and assuming that that satisfies
(41:52):
the same impulse, it doesn't satisfy the same impulse. I
feel really sad for lots of suburban dogs. I see them,
you know, in a dog kennel or on a long lead,
or just left outside, and mostly they're just hugging the
fence or looking right at the door, waiting to go in,
or waiting for somebody to go by so they can
(42:14):
maybe have an interaction. That's that's no way to live
a life.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
So what I hear you saying is both, you know,
like you're saying like it's like a when you're talking
to a doctor. It's like, I don't know what your
particular situation is, right, Like, I think Ali actually to
your point, I think he does enjoy the stimuli of
the city. He loves being outside and seeing all his
dog friends, and you know, you can just tell he's excited.
(42:44):
But then it's also, like you're saying, just living in
one place or another does not determine how good of
a dog owner you are. Like, just simply being in
the suburbs doesn't mean your dog is going to live
a better life if you're not actually actively doing anything
to make sure that your dog is being stimulated outside
of like, all right, you're in the backyard. Cool, like
now you're inside?
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think no dog.
Speaker 6 (43:08):
You know, all dogs are different.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
They're fearful, they're excited by stimuli, really different dogs. Some
really like playing with other dogs. Some just really want
to be around their people all the time. You know,
are you allowing them to do that in both these cases?
And how much do the people think about what the
dogs need and want and what they're doing right now?
Speaker 6 (43:27):
You know, most people who.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Live in in city with a dog, if you said,
right now, where's your dog, they know the dog is
like right there, and they know when they're going to
take their dog out again, they're thinking about it. If
the good dog people in the suburbs, you know, who
knows where the dog is. You know, it's a different
type of connection with your dog, and it's a different
type of responsibility for your dog.
Speaker 6 (43:50):
And for you know, for the two I live with
two dogs right now. It's another good example.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
They both love it when we go into a rural
area and there's like a fenced area where they can
just hang out. But most of the time they want
to just be with us on the couch. Right, And
one of the dogs wants to have a ball tossed
again and again. Yeah, you know, the yard doesn't toss
the ball, right, I have to be there tossing the ball, right.
(44:19):
And so a yard is not a satisfaction. It's just
the way that we grew up. And if you had
asked me this question one hundred years ago, the question
would have been like, you know, should we have dogs
wandering through city streets or you know, should we keep
(44:40):
them only in kennels? And like, neither of those is
perfect for every dog either, right, But it's just very
locally culturally. This is the kind of dichotomy that we
see now. People love to say dogs in cities, I
don't have a good life. Dogs lives in the city
can be excellent, just great, full of other dogs, full
(45:01):
of a lot of attention from people, smells, imagine the smells.
Speaker 6 (45:05):
And on the streets of New York City.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
I mean it's delicious, right, So it has its own
set of stimuli with a good dog person, it's a
great scenario.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Well, a lot of that surprised me, even I'm even
questioning my initial reaction to some of those tiktoks we
were seeing, which is that Like I'm like, oh, this
dog clearly prefers this environment. But as she was saying,
it just wasn't used to it. It's excited about something different, exploring,
(45:37):
running around a little bit, and then maybe the next
TikTok taking them a week later, it's just fucking bored sitting.
Speaker 5 (45:45):
Well yeah, well, I mean in some ways it made
me feel better, like at least I am giving my
dog a lot of attention. Yeah, my dog personally, I know,
would prefer a quieter place. Yeah, but you know, at
least it's like, well, it.
Speaker 4 (45:57):
Doesn't mean you're ruining his life.
Speaker 5 (45:59):
Yeah, I don't think he's not as miserable as he
could be.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Well you can have riz in the suburbs and not
be as attentive and yeah exactly. Yeah, you know, it
could go to any other direction right where he could be.
You know, he would have been happy if he was
in the city.
Speaker 5 (46:19):
Then he's getting antsy and stuff because we're not doing much.
I will say, when we were in Virginia, even like
by you know, we were there for a little over
a week. At a certain point, maybe five days in,
he went on on a walk and then was kind
of like, I'm done, I want to go back, even
though we were outside and with the other dogs and
all the stuff. So it's kind of like, once you
get used to something, it's not going to be as
(46:40):
fun anymore, you know.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah, in some ways.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
I guess this definitely made me feel better, obviously, but
I think the big my big takeaway from it was
like being intentional about how your dog is spending their time. Yeah, right,
Like you said, so much of what our dogs do
day to day is dependent on what we do with them.
(47:04):
And it's not even like she talks about in her book. Right,
it's not just taking your dog out for a walk.
It's letting your dog sometimes dictate where they want to walk. Right,
It's not always I want to walk this, where we're
going this, where we're doing this thing you're on a leash.
It's like maybe this walk, I'll let you lead, and
maybe like we don't need to get around the block.
We'll just going to be outside for thirty minutes, and
(47:27):
if you want to smell a tree for twenty of
those minutes, that's fine. We can stand here for twenty minutes.
So something that I'm since I've done this interview, been
considering is how can I do more things? Yeah, living
knowing that I'm living in the city, knowing that he
doesn't maybe have as much room to run around. How
can I have him explore in different ways, even if
(47:49):
it's just going for a walk. How can I be
more intentional about that stuff? Someone on TikTok said, like,
a good way to think about it is like being
outside with your dog and them smelling it's their TikTok.
Speaker 5 (48:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Yeah, so as annoyed as you are that they're sniffing
the tree for three minutes. Yeah, Like they can't watch TV,
they can't be on TikTok, their version of TikTok. So
you may think this is boring and you might want
to be like, let's go, But they are enjoying themselves
and you're the reason you're walking them is for them,
(48:24):
So just let them do today.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Yeah, it's funny to take the dog for a walk.
But then be like, yeah, and I.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Got a big dog and he got trust issues the dog.
I still miss you. I made mistakes the first time
and like the last time, sit you up with BM
That us just the sound.
Speaker 8 (48:48):
Line again.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Again.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Thing is produced by Manny Fidelle, Noah Friedman and me
Devin Joseph. The theme song is by Manny. This song
is Big Dog by my band Maurice and it's featuring
Kenyon Thing certain self and Alli's on this track, too Beautiful.
Our guest this week list Alexandra Horowitz. Check out her
(49:20):
book Inside of a Dog. We'll put a link to
it in the newsletter. No such thing not show.
Speaker 7 (49:26):
If you're a.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Fan of what we are doing, please give us five stars.
We got some haters giving one stars, so we gotta
get our ratings up. Our ratings are pretty good, but
it could be even higher, so five stars. We'll be
back next week with a new episode.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Oh one more thing that I I want to mention.
People say to me all the time, you can't have
a big dog in the city. You know, they can
run fast, they have a lot of energy, but they
also calm, yes, right, And what do they need like
a huge apartment to run around and all the time. No,
Allie's on the couch or whatever, right, Like, that's that's
(50:27):
what he's doing at. Little dogs, by contrast, are much
more high energy all the time. And it's our smaller
dog who's barking at things out the window, who's like, right,
on the edge of, you know, really excited. So I
feel like if you have a little dog, you shouldn't
live in the city. No, I'm not I'm not going
to come down that way.
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