THE YEAR OF THE PUPPY: How Dogs Become Themselves

For THE YEAR OF THE PUPPY: How Dogs Become Themselves, Alexandra Horowitz, Head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, follows a puppy from birth through her first year of life.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina delRio, a weekly conversation about fitness,
health and happenings in our community onone oh six point seven Light FM.
Good morning, and thanks for listeningto Get Connected. If you're a dog
owner, most of your attention isprobably spent on feeding them, on walking
them, on playing. But perhapsthe most useful way to really know a

(00:24):
dog is to know them from theinside out. Our guest is Alexander Horowitz,
author of the new book The Yearof the Puppy, How Dogs Become
Themselves. Alexander, thank you forbeing on Get Connected. It's my pleasure.
Alexander Horowitz leads the Dog Cognition Labat Barnard College and for this book
follows a puppy ultimately which became herown dog from birth through the first year

(00:46):
of her life. You have haddogs before. Your life is dog related.
You study dogs for science. Whydid you decide to follow one particular
dog so closely? What did youwant to know that you and already know?
You know? There's a quote likeSigared Nunez, who was a great
literary writer who wrote a book calledThe Friend about a woman who adopts a

(01:08):
dog. Later in the dog's life, and she expresses this sadness not to
have known him as a frisky youngdog. And I think actually that captures
what a lot of our experiences are, especially if we are people have gotten
dogs from shelters many months or evenyears into their life, which is that

(01:29):
you didn't get to see them whenthey were a puppy and know what those
early events of their life did tomake them the dog they were today.
That you know. And so myinterest was to personally meet a dog in
their early days and also then tracethe science of early dog development and try

(01:52):
to attach it to the behavior Iwas seeing. As you say in the
book, well, a human hasa few years to figure out out to
make sense of the world. Puppieshave just a few months to not only
figure out how to eat, poop, communicate and move around with other dogs.
There's just so much to learn.How much is their mother involved in
the beginning, and how key istheir mother in those first few weeks.

(02:15):
The mother is hugely key in thefirst few weeks. I mean, they
are very very helpless at birth,They need help being born. They are
blind their death, their ears arefolded over the ear canals which are closed,
they basically can barely hold their headup. You know, they can

(02:36):
move a little bit, and theymostly can suck. So if their mom
puts them on her nipple, thenthey can get a meal, but if
she doesn't, then they're kind ofstranded. So they actually need her hugely
in their first days. And althoughthen in several days their eyes open,
their ears start to open, theyget stronger and can move around really big

(03:00):
part of their life and kind ofthe center of their universe for a few
weeks. But notice I say afew weeks, right, It's not like
we consider motherhood in the human societywhere you know, my mom is still
involved in my life, right,and I'm a well grown adult. The

(03:21):
mothers of the litters that I've seen, and this is typical for most dog
litters, steps out of the wayafter several weeks. In fact, even
kind of scolding puppies for being overexuberant and helps them become independent. By
the time they're probably going to beadopted into a human family, which is

(03:42):
about eight weeks into their life atearliest. Jumping ahead to that, the
relationship to its mother changes, andthat's why that's a point where most breeders
and researchers think that's the best timeto place it in a new home.
Why that time, Yeah, exactly. They have had exposure many weeks of
cure to each other, they've weanedfrom their mother, they've hopefully been introduced

(04:04):
to lots of the types of thingspeople, sounds, smells that they will
need to interact with in their humanhomes. And they've also reached this kind
of peak cuteness quotient. It's actuallya time when researchers have found that people

(04:24):
rate puppies the cutest at about eightweeks, so we're kind of most susceptible
to them as well. So,yeah, they've learned to become sufficiently independent,
learned about dog and human worlds alittle bit. If they've gotten socialized
well and are very ambulatory, canrun and jump, and are physically radically

(04:46):
more developed than they were a fewweeks prior. And that's a pretty good
time to put them in a humanhome. They're learning about the world all
in that short time. Puppies haveto deal with another species. As humans,
we don't necessarily have to learn anotherspecies. Puppies have to learn about
humans as well, or most ofthe time, what if they're going to
be in someone's home. How doeshuman handling of a newborn puppy help them

(05:09):
deal with stress? It's huge,actually, I mean, first, they
do need to be exposed to humansto be really accepting of humans. Later,
although all dogs, unlike lots ofnon human animals, kind of have
a predisposition to look to us andto be open to humans, they still
have to be exposed to people forthat to really play out to be developed

(05:34):
in them. So not only dothey have to be exposed to us,
but then there are lots of researchrecommendations that you actually handle kind of manhandle
a puppy carefully in their early weeksin order to get them used to being
in different positions and also to feelan affiliation and closeness with contact with humans

(05:57):
which they wouldn't naturally and later onassociation within closeness to humans can actually help
them in stress stressful situations as opposedto being the stressful situation. Alexandra Horowitz
leads the Dog Cognition Lab at BarnardCollege and for this book follows a puppy
ultimately which became her own. Forthe new book, The Year of the

(06:18):
Puppy, How Dogs become themselves.You're listening to get connected on one oh
six point seven light FM, I'mmina del rio. To get back to
that particular relationship that dogs and humanshave, maybe we can contrast it for
a minute with a cat. Anyonewho has a cat knows that it can't
can't figure out what you're pointing ator what pointing is. But dogs can.

(06:39):
Yeah. Dogs, not every dog, but on the average, dogs
are quite good at doing following thesesome of these communicative gestures that we do
with each other, and that includesfollowing a point to the source of whatever
we're pointing at instead of just lookingat the finger and doing the same thing
with our gaze, so following wherewe're looking to get information about what we're

(07:01):
looking at. Babies learn to dothis, and then that's the kind of
scaffold for them learning lots about otherminds and how to communicate with others and
how to get information from others.So dogs being able to do that actually
does lead to lots of different behaviorsin their relationship with humans than we see

(07:24):
in non dogs. Along the sameline, what do dogs understand about our
language? I know there's body language, but our vocal language. It seems
they're trying to understand us when wetalk. And you do mention in the
book about trying not to speak ina full sentence, but what are they
actually picking up. Well, it'samazing to me that they're attuned to any

(07:46):
of our language at all. Andit is the case that, you know,
why should they be. They're notspeaking a human language with each other,
and we pay very little attention totheir vocalizations except for to kind of
try to suppress them. But itis the case that if we speak to
dogs in what's called a dog directedspeech, which is also kind of called

(08:07):
baby talk when it's used with babies, they seem to notice that speech more
so if they're around speech all thetime. But you want your dog to
notice that now I'm talking to you, it might be useful to have this
slightly higher intonation. And again,because they're not born with human genetics predisposed

(08:30):
to learn language, they aren't sensitiveto structures of sentences. But they are
very good at learning the phonetics ofour speech and picking up on tone and
general cadence of words, so thatthey can learn many, many words.
And there has been research. I'msure some of your listeners will know with

(08:50):
for instance, a border calling namedChaser who learned over a thousand words in
interaction with her person, John Pilley. I will say, though that John
was talking to her using these words, you know, for many hours every
day for years, so they canpick it up. But unless you start
speak to them clearly a lot andoften, there's no reason that they would

(09:15):
naturally pick up most of our language. When adopting a young dog, people
will say, the dog chose me, locked eyes with me, it sat
down next to me. What ismost likely to be true about that scenario
that there is something about the personand what they want in their companion which

(09:35):
they've found, which they'd identify featuresof with that dog, which I think
is fine. You know, there'sno science per se about how to pick
the perfect dog for you. Butif you are predisposed to like the way
a dog looks, or find acouple of behaviors that feel make the dog

(09:56):
it feel like the dog is reallyresponding to you, that's the great a
great start to a relationship. Itdoesn't mean the relationship is always going to
go smoothly because you think this isa cute dog, but you're already predisposed
to kind of give them the benefitof the doubt, to work to help
them understand what you need from themand how your human household works, and
that's where the good relationship will willemanate. Is the dog sitting next to

(10:22):
the person or staring at the persona coincidence or just random? No,
I mean dogs are more or lessinterested in people, right, I mean
I think most dogs are, andwhen they're very young, pretty interested in
people. So maybe that maybe there'ssome that are more interested in looking at
the people in the room than thatthe other dogs across the room, and

(10:45):
that might tell you something important aboutthem, but not radically different. You
know, there's nothing that you canreally see in those often few minutes or
less than an hour that we spendwith the dog when we're deciding who to
adopt or to buy by dog,that's telling us about their personality. Deep

(11:05):
down, it's just an indication ofthe types of things that might be in
their kind of behavioral vocabulary. Alittle later in the book, you took
your dog to meet one of itssiblings. Do puppies or dogs remember or
appear to remember their mothers or siblingswhen reunited with them months later we see
these videos. What is you thinktrue? I think that there is good

(11:28):
research to say that they can recognizeor seem to prefer to affiliate with blankets
imbued with the smell of their siblingover blankets that have the smell of another
dog. So I think there's somememory and discrimination happening, but it's not
necessarily explicit memory, like, ah, the way we would remember I grew
up with ten other puppies, andI wonder where they are, and oh,

(11:50):
I'm glad to see this one.When I had a reunion between our
puppy and another one of the litterwho she hadn't seen for several months,
there didn't appear to be any behaviorsof recognition. On the other hands,
they were pretty well matched in play, and they probably took to play more
quickly more readily than she would havewith a completely new dog, so there

(12:15):
might be some familiar aspects which alsomight just be part of body matching.
You know, their similar size,similar age, and they look similar because
they were from the same litter.In this case, that also could account
for what it was rather than beingrecognition. So there's not a lot of
evidence that they have explicit like sayout loud memories of other puppies, but

(12:39):
maybe that it's something just kind ofimplicit, sort of deep into themselves to
wrap up. I'm sure even thoughyou work in this field, I imagine
you've watched plenty of dog videos onlineand I can't help but I always see
people saying things like the dog finallyrealizes they're adopted, or the dog thinks
they're a sheep, or something like, Yeah, do dogs actually have a

(13:01):
capacity to realize you think the futureof consequences, or even that an animal
is an other species, or arewe just anthropomorphizing? You know, I
don't think a dog knows that they'rebeing adopted. I do think that they
are excited to meet somebody new,and they do think they can think at
some level into the future. There'sgood evidence that they remember the past.

(13:22):
It's not that they're devoid of anyhuman attributes, but we can be very
hasty in putting those on them.I think my approach as a scientist and
as a person that lives with dogsis more to try to hold out on
making those claims and instead just lettheir behavior show me what they're doing and

(13:43):
maybe what they're feeling. It's alovely book, The Year of the Puppy,
How Dogs Become Themselves by Andrea Horowitz. Andrea, thank you for being
on the show. Thanks so much. This has been get connected with Nina
del Rio on one IO six pointseven light FM. The views and opinions
of our guests do not necessarily reflectthe views of the station. If you

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for downloads and podcasts at one Osix seven lightfm dot com. Thanks for listening.