What's Going on Inside Your Dog's Mind?

From Time.com Image: From The Times Online.uk photo archives - this is Queenie. company of the 5th London (Press) Battalion of the Home Guard lines up in readiness for inspection in November 1943 before giving a demonstration of street fighting to members of a Kent unit of the Home Guard. ’Queenie’, the Press Battalion’s alsatian mascot, seems to be well drilled too. Elsewhere, the Red Army had just recaptured the city of Kiev and the RAF had begun intensive bombing of Berlin. The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind By Carl Zimmer Monday, Sep. 21, 2009 Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit. "Henry!" he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix--a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry's collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit. "You got it?" Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he's standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room--neither dog nor human--can tell which cup hides the biscuit. Henry could find the biscuit by sniffing the cups or knocking them over. But Hare does not plan to let him have it so easy. Instead, he simply points at the cup on the right. Henry looks at Hare's hand and follows the pointed finger. Kivell then releases the leash, and Henry walks over to the cup that Hare is pointing to. Hare lifts it to reveal the biscuit reward. Henry the schnoodle just did a remarkable thing. Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought. Henry, as Kivell affectionately admits, may not be "the sharpest knife in the drawer," but compared to other animals, he's a true scholar. It's no coincidence that the two species that pass Hare's pointing test also share a profound cross-species bond. Many animals have some level of social intelligence, allowing them to coexist and cooperate with other members of their species. Wolves, for example--the probable ancestors of dogs--live in packs that hunt together and have a complex hierarchy. But dogs have evolved an extraordinarily rich social intelligence as they've adapted to life with us. All the things we love about our dogs--the joy they seem to take in our presence, the many ways they integrate themselves into our lives--spring from those social skills. Hare and others are trying to figure out how the intimate coexistence of humans and dogs has shaped the animal's remarkable abilities. Rest of article (it's lengthy, but really good reading!)

Brazen Dog Shoplifts!

Hola darlings! I found this article from the December 26, 2008 Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel sitting on my footstool in the family room - buried under tons of investment club stuff! I think I must not have published it, but it's so cute, I just have to pass it along. When I did a search I found it reported at dozens of websites/blogs. The original information as reported in my local newspaper was from KSL-TV: www.ksl.com (There's a link to the surveillance video at the end of this piece - just too funny!) Here's the story: Pooch grabs bone, makes getaway Associated Press (December 26, 2008) Murray, Utah - A thief remains at large after pulling off a daring heist - in the pet food aisle. Surveillance video at a supermarket in this Salt Lake City suburb caught a dog shoplifting, KSL-TV reported Wednesday. The video showed the dog walking in the front door of Smith's Food & Drug in Murray and heading straight to Aisle 16, the pet food aisle, where it grabbed a bone worth $2.79. The thief wasn't even perturbed by a face-to-face confrontation with store manager Roger Adamson. "I looked at him. I said "Drop it!" Adamson said. "He looked at me, and I looked at him, and he ran for the door and away he went, right out the front door."

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LOL! Here's another take on the story from the Examiner.com: Shoplifting dog caught on surveillance camera-video December 26, 2:37 AM by Helena Sung, Pet News Examiner Tongues and tails are wagging about a shoplifting dog in Murray, Utah. The canine--who appears on surveillance video to be a gray Siberian Husky--coolly ambled into a supermarket on Christmas Day. After sniffing a young girl near the cash registers, the dog wandered further into the store where his super sense of smell led him directly to Aisle 16--the pet food aisle. The dog picked out a rawhide bone worth $2.79 and headed for the exit when he was confronted by the store's manager, Roger Adamson. "I said, 'drop it!'" Adamson recalled, but the dog chose to ignore the unreasonable request. "I decided I wanted to keep all my fingers, so I didn't try to take it from him." The dog turned away and sauntered out the front door, daring anyone to follow him. Humans, delighted at the tale, can watch the video here...

Dogs Are Smarter Than We Think

I'm a dog lover, raised from a long line of dog lovers. I already had two canine companions when we moved into this place, and I adopted a third in 1991. The four of us happily rattled around the house and garden, until one by one, they succumbed to old age and went off to the Happy Hunting Ground. It broke my heart each time I lost one of my doggies, so these days I'm dogless. As any dog owner knows, some dogs are very smart. Spencer, who died in May, 1999, was a small peekapoo with a temperamental disposition who let me know he suffered my role as master of the house only to keep a roof over his head and food in his dish. He was smart as a whip and he loved sitting on my lap while I played OTB chess. He would sit very still, his head just peeking up above the edge of the table, and stare intently at the board. He never went so far as to shove a piece forward with his paw or pick one up in his mouth, but I swear he knew the game better than I! It seems scientists are finally learning just how smart dogs are. This news story hit the wires earlier in the week - I saw it today in my local newspaper: What Were They Thinking? More Than We Knew. By Rob SteinWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, June 4, 2007; Page A05 Dog owners have long maintained that their pooches have a lot more going on between their furry ears than scientists acknowledge. Now, new research is adding to the growing evidence that man's best friend thinks a lot more than many humans have believed. The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans, including infants, have been shown capable of doing: decide how to imitate a behavior based on the specific circumstances in which the action takes place. "The fact that the dogs imitate selectively, depending on the situation -- that has not been shown before," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, who led the study. "That's something completely new." The findings come amid a flurry of research that is revealing surprisingly complex abilities among dogs, chimps, birds and many other animals long dismissed as having little intellectual or emotional life. "Every day, we're discovering surprises about animals and finding out animals are far more intelligent and far more emotional than we previously thought," said Marc Bekoff, an animal behaviorist who recently retired from the University of Colorado. "We're really breaking down the lines between the species." The study was inspired by research with human infants. Fourteen-month-olds will imitate an adult turning on a light with her forehead only if they see her doing it with her hands free. If the adult is clutching a blanket, infants will use their hands, presumably because they can reason that the adult resorted to using her forehead because she had no choice. To determine whether an animal could respond similarly, Range and her colleagues trained Guinness, a female border collie, to push a wooden rod with her paw to get a treat. A dog generally does not use its paws to do tasks, preferring to use its mouth whenever possible. So the key question was whether dogs that watched Guinness would decide how to get the treat depending on the circumstances. After making sure the owners could not influence their pets' behavior, researchers tested three groups of dogs. The first 14, representing a variety of breeds, did not watch Guinness. When taught how to use the rod, about 85 percent pushed it with their mouth, confirming that is how dogs naturally like to do things. The second group of 21 dogs watched Guinness repeatedly push the rod with her paw while holding a ball in her mouth. In that group, most of the dogs -- about 80 percent -- used their mouth, imitating the action but not the exact method Guinness had used. That suggested the dogs -- like the children -- decided Guinness was only using her paw because she had no choice. The third group of 19 dogs watched Guinness repeatedly use a paw on the rod with her mouth free. Most of those dogs -- 83 percent -- imitated her behavior exactly, using their paws and not their mouth. That suggested they concluded there must be some good reason to act against their instincts and do it like Guinness. "The behavior was very similar to the children who were tested in the original experiment," said Zsofia Viranyi of Eotvos University in Budapest, who helped conduct the experiment, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Current Biology. "Whether they imitate or not depends on the context. It's not automatic, insightless copying. It's more sophisticated. There's a kind of inferential process going on. " Viranyi and her colleagues said more research is needed to confirm the results and to explore what the findings say about the canine brain."Do they use the same cognitive process as the infant? Or is it something different?" Range said. "We have no way of knowing that right now." The findings stunned many researchers. "What's surprising and shocking about this is that we thought this sort of imitation was very sophisticated, something seen only in humans," said Brian Hare, who studies dogs at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "Once again, it ends up dogs are smarter than scientists thought." The experiment suggests that dogs can put themselves inside the head of another dog -- and perhaps people -- to make relatively complex decisions. "This suggests they can actually think about your intention -- they can look for explanations of your behavior and make inferences about what you are thinking," Hare said. Others go even further, suggesting the findings indicate that dogs have a sense of awareness. "It really shows a higher level of consciousness," said Stanley Coren at the University of British Columbia, who studies how dogs think. "This takes a real degree of consciousness." Others were more skeptical, saying it's too far a leap to conclude from the study that dogs possess conscious awareness. "It's so easy for the human mind to look at a dog doing something like this and force our human way of thinking about it on the dog," said Daniel J. Povinelli, a cognitive scientist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. "This ability might happen automatically without any conscious reflection on the dog's part." The findings could simply be yet another example of the well-documented ability of dogs to interpret subtle physical cues that stem from their long, close relationship with humans, several researchers said. "Dogs are really keen observers of the world around them," said Bruce Blumberg, who teaches classes on dog behavior at Harvard University. "They use simple but reliable rules that capture just enough of a problem to be able to just do better than guessing. This may just be another example of that." Regardless of the interpretation, the research reflects a renewed interest in dogs. "There's been an extraordinary explosion in research on dogs," said Stephen Zawistowski, an animal behaviorist at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "What we're seeing really for the first time is incredibly serious and important work on dog behavior and dog genetics. The really important work will be when the canine cognitive work meets the canine genome work. It's going to give us information about where these capabilities come from."