What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund | Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Dr. Carolina Westland.

Dr. Carolina Westland is an animal ethologist and expert in animal behavior.

Dr. Westland and I discussed the relationship between humans and domesticated animals with a focus on the evidence -based protocols for optimizing the mental and physical health of our pets.

Dr. Westland explains the best way to interact with our animals.

Now we may assume that the way we pet our animals and exercise them and feed them makes them truly happy.

But as she points out, many of the things that people assume turn out to be false when it comes to our pets and their fundamental drives.

She teaches us the very basic but powerful things that we can do to satisfy those drives, both for the animal's sake, of course, and to better our relationship with them.

We also discussed the unique neurological and physiological requirements of different dog breeds, that's a fascinating conversation that stems from their lineage from wolves.

And we'll tell you whether or not your particular breed, even if it's a mutt should be exercised in a particular way, whether or not it needs additional forms of stimulation that you're not currently giving it, and so on.

And because we both realize there are also cat owners out there too, we discuss the often misunderstood communication signals and social needs of cats.

As you may know, there is a tremendous amount of debate out there about the best training and practices for taking care of our dogs and other animals.

And so much of that is grounded in speculation and training outcomes, which of course are important.

The conversation today with Dr. Westland approaches animal health and welfare through the lens of ethology and the species that our pets evolved from to provide actionable protocols that are grounded in science and that you can implement right away to improve your pet's wellbeing.

So if you're a pet owner, this episode is going to be of immense value to you.

If you're not a pet owner, you'll still learn a ton about animal biology and psychology, including yours.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Carolina Westland.

Dr. Carolina Westland, welcome.

Thank you. I'm super excited for this conversation.

And barely contain myself.

I think we have so much to learn from animals.

And I think we have so much to learn from our relationship to animals.

I also believe that we have all sorts of ideas about what animals experience, what they think about us, the relationship that we think we have with them.

Today, you're going to set the record straight.

To start off, could you just briefly list off some of the species of animals that your students have worked with and studied?

Most of my students are like guardians of animals.

So they're like dog owners or horse trainers, or there might be veterinarians.

Some of them work in a zoo as a zookeeper or animal trainer and so on.

So my students are really diverse, and their knowledge levels is also really diverse.

from the person who has their first dog at the age of 40 to somebody who's been training animals for 30 years?

I grew up around a few horse people.

My first girlfriend had a horse, and it was remarkable to me to see and to get some just external understanding of the relationship between human and animal through observing that.

I think of all the relationships between animals and humans.

The horse -human relationship seems to be the one where there's the most amount of physical contact.

You ride a horse, you learn to read the horse's intentions, it learns to read yours through the subtle, you know, squeezing of the legs, or, you know, kicking not kicking hard, but, you know, like just like a nudge of the heel, just a slight tug on the reins, it's really remarkable.

What does the horse experience the world as?

I've heard before that, you know, they sort of have these orbs of awareness around them and that they're paying attention to things on the horizon that they're clearly paying attention to things very up close to their body.

But if you were to put us into the mind of a horse as best you can, how does the horse experience the world as a wild horse and with a rider on its back trying to steer it in a particular direction at a particular speed.

As an ethologist, I tend to take a step back and look at sort of the species in general, and horses are prey animals.

They are also herd animals, and I think that we as humans, we tend to not really understand how different animal species can be from ourselves and how they perceive the world and what's important to them.

So horses being prey animals means that they're usually quite vigilant so they're paying a lot of attention to the world and they have this, their visual field is really big so they can sort of see what's happening back there.

The issue I have with how we raise and keep horses today as an ethologist and sort of looking at how animals live their lives in the wild is that we keep them in a way that sort challenges them in several aspects of that so we tend to separate them quite early from their mum, even though in the wild they would stay for a very long time.

So I think some of the concerns that I have as an ethologist with how we raise horses is the early weaning that we sometimes see, and also single housing for a species that's an aggregating species, and also that they in the wild they will forage up to 16 hours a day And when we bring them into captivity we typically feed them in a way that promotes very quick eating for just perfection of that time.

And that can then lead to problem behavior.

So for me, I think horses are probably one of the captive animal species where for many individual horses the type of life that we're offering is really not that great.

Interesting. Dogs, I know, are very smell -oriented.

They experience the world, perhaps largely, but certainly quite a bit through their noses.

They can sense odor, and set a distance, and certainly up close, they like to get their nose right into things, and sniff, get into deep sniffs.

And they're always collecting information with their noses.

is there's a huge range of dog breeds.

And I think any discussion about dogs requires that we first kind of separate out some of the major differences, at least in terms of the purebred versions of them.

When I see a Mastiff versus a Chihuahua versus like a Scentound, I'm looking at, to me, what appear to be very different animals.

Is it true that certain dogs rely on their sense of smell far more than others?

And if so, do the ones that rely on their nose just not pay attention to what they're looking at?

Unless you insist. I mean, the other version of this question is, how should we interact with dogs differently depending on what breed of dog they are?

Yeah, so I think I can't really answer the first part of that question.

I don't know the extent to which different dog breeds, their sensory capabilities, how much that differs between different dog breeds.

However, how to interact with different dog breeds, I think that's really a really interesting question.

Because during the process of domestication, and in just the last couple of hundred years really, we started selecting for different capabilities in the different dogs, that we needed for different tasks essentially.

So, if we look at a wolf hunting sequence, what they'll do is they'll do an orient response where they they sniff and they they're sort of looking for a prey, and then they will do some eyeing and stalking behavior, so they'll focus and they'll do stalking, and then they'll do chasing, and then they'll do a grab bite, a killing bite, then they'll dissect and then they'll eat the prey.

So we have this whole predatory sequence that we see in wolves, and what happened during the process of domestication was that we selected for certain aspects of that sequence in different breeds.

So we'll have the sniffers, the hounds that are really great.

And I guess maybe that answers your first question.

I think that probably all dog breeds enjoy sniffing.

It's one of the big things that people are exploring a lot now, is nose work.

But anyway, back to this process of domestication.

And then we had the pointers who we have really selected for that behavior.

You know in a litter of puppies, we would select the one that was the most prone to do that behavior.

and so over generations we really sculpted that niche so to speak so a pointer will typically not proceed then to the next behavior of the predatory sequence and then we have like the border collies who might do some chasing or some eyeing and stalking and a little bit of chase but ideally no grabbing and we have the pure chasers, the greyhounds for instance And then we have the grabbers, the retrievers, and then we have the killers, the terriers.

People, I'm assuming were anticipating you to say the pit bulls or the Dobermans, but anyone that's owned a terrier, will know that they are great ratting dogs.

They were bred to exterminate small rodents and stuff.

Yeah. Anyone who's seen a Westie, those cute little West Highland terriers, The little white ones, they're real cute.

If one of those hears or senses a rodent in the wall, I've seen one stalk one for several days.

They will move along.

We used to call it rat TV.

The Westie will sense when and where the rodent is there with an absolute fixation, and if there's any way to get into that wall and kill that rodent, it's coming out with that rodent in its mouth.

It's remarkable. The amount of dedication is just striking.

And it's all about killing that rat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we systematically, intentionally bred for that, like a couple hundred years ago.

And then we have the ones that don't show much of the predatory sequence at all that simply, mostly, just eat.

Which are the, what do you call them, the ones that help livestock guardians.

They still like the sniffing.

so they tend to retain the sniffing part and then specific breeds will have one or perhaps a few of the behaviors from the hunting sequence so I think if we want to offer dogs a good life, we should understand where they are on that scale and also that the working dogs come sort of with this evolutionary backpack their genetic backpack, will encourage them to really want to do that work.

And then we have the also the sort of, I think they're sometimes referred to as toy breeds, the ones that are lap dogs, who are not that interested in any of that working dog behavior.

So I think it's, we need to, with regards to the different breeds, we need to really understand what purpose they were bred before, I think.

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That's a beautiful and to me completely novel description of the breakdown of different breeds.

Not according to the dosing of Wolf versus Mastiff genes, which is what some of the more reductionist research papers on this really do.

They have these charts.

We'll provide a link to one that was published in Science magazine about 10 years back that had this dosing of Mastiff genes versus Wolf genes.

And what you just described beautifully breaks down what one observes if you go to a dog park or the beach. My bulldog Mastiff Costello, he was a mudded bulldog.

So I always say, you know, no underbite.

So it wasn't this, it was this.

Right? So a proper bulldog before they inbred them so much that they have the underbite and the short snout, the brachiocephalic, the breathing issues.

But he neither stalked, nor chased, nor was he interested in killing anything.

he didn't have that sense to try and harm, but he certainly liked to consume.

So he was at the end of that behavioral description.

And I think - And what were they bred for?

So I'll try and not take up too much time on this one cause I wanna learn from you.

The original Bulldog line was a cross between a mastiff, something like a mastiff, a strong, large, high pain tolerance, and a pug short snout.

And the gene cross there, and obviously the dogogenesis weren't thinking about specific genes, they were thinking about traits, was the short snout was great for what's called bull baiting, because that short snout provides a kind of lever that when they bite down onto the nose of a bull, which is what they were used for, it was a cruel practice, very hard to shake them loose.

The bull could shake them and they're not gonna shake loose.

Just think about trying to pick something up with long tongs, right?

the physics of this versus a clamp, right?

Like a C clamp. The mutation that takes the pain receptors out of the face or reduces them is close by another gene that is involved in generating the tensile nature of the skin.

So this is why they have the jowls, the folds.

And you can, I don't suggest anyone do this, but Costello, I'll just give an example.

It sometimes unfortunately would like get a fish hook through his jowl when he was playing at the ocean or something.

And he'd come up to me, bleeding, smiling, basically you have to take this thing out.

His pain tolerance was quite high.

Pain tolerance is very high in the front of the animal in the face and toward the rear of the animal, he touches back toe and it's, so they have a gradient of pain receptors that runs high density in the back, low density of the front.

So they were bred for bull baiting.

And the original line has been bred out.

It's people who care about the bulldog breed dog and bring in some more humane breeding practices to the bulldog because it's a pretty brutal breed now, have tried to reestablish the original line, which again, were elbows back, no strong underbite as opposed to what you see now.

So that's the sort of brief history on the bulldog.

They have to be born by cesarean because shoulders, small hips.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the bulldog, I always said and this will take us back to of behavior was the contract that I felt I had with my bulldog was one of he would protect me to the death.

You do notice that anytime they hear a noise or anything, they're hyper -vigilant.

But if there's no impending threat, total relaxation, the most efficient use of energy of any species.

So basically, it was I'll die for you, Andrew, but unless your life is in danger, I'm not gonna do anything.

So maybe we could talk about temperament in dogs and how they experience their emotional life.

I don't know if we can make general statements about this, but you've spent a lot of your time thinking about the emotional life of animals.

What does a dog need in order to feel calm and safe?

Great question. Yeah, so in order to feel calm and safe, I think we, perhaps we should go to the core effect space, which I think is one of the three emotional models that I find very, very useful in understanding, providing like a good environment for animals so that they can thrive, really.

So the core effect space is, is one way of depicting or conceptualizing emotions where we have like valence on the x -axis so how pleasant or unpleasant something is and we have arousal on the y -axis.

So what you're asking is how can we make animals and I'm not just not just dogs but any species how can we put them in quadrant 2 of that core effect space essentially so low arousal and pleasant so where they're relaxed and they're feeling safe and they're they're sort of engaging socially with others and being sort of at ease, if you will.

So how do we get there?

And I think that some of the things to consider is then the absence of negative emotions.

So if, again, if we're in the core effect space in that quadrant IV, with a high arousal, unpleasant states, we'll find things like fear, aggression.

So helping reduce that will sort of automatically help animals move to the right in the matrix, and in the lower quadrant three with the unpleasant low arousal state, where animals tend to end up if they're sort of bored or depressed, is engaging them, providing an environment that's stimulating that they can sort of do interesting things in to help them move into the to the right side of the core effect space and also to the to the talk in that the quadrant one is the high -arousal pleasant state but that that would be like seeking or foraging behavior exploration play sex but as to your question how

do we get into quadrant II with feeling safe and sort of that warm fuzzy feeling.

So some of the things to do might be to if the animal enjoys it, coming from you and they often have to know you in order to really appreciate it is like tactile stimulation, so petting essentially.

Something that might interfere is that we primates, we humans are primates and huggers, we tend to sort of go like this when we want to interact with an animal that we really like.

And to many animals this is restraint and really scary.

And so, the type of body contact that we offer to animals that we should consider whether they really enjoy it or not, whether they tolerate it or enjoy it.

And one way of doing that is to offer a consent test. So, you might You might offer your hand and scratch a little bit, ideally in a place that the animal really enjoys.

So most dogs don't enjoy having a hand on top of their head, but rather perhaps here.

On their neck. Or the upper chest, sort of.

So you might do that for a few seconds and then you remove your hand to see, does the animal enjoy this and will they then reinitiate that contact or not?

Or will they move away?

And I have this issue with my cat now that he is not very, he doesn't sort of enjoy petting as much as I do petting him, so I have to be really mindful that I really offer him the chance to say, no, thanks.

So we might consider just touching the animal as you're calling a consent test, like as a test, and then if they move toward you, then what is the pattern of tactile stimulation simulation that's that dogs like I've been reading up on this a little bit and somebody Ran an experiment.

I think it's kind of interesting describing the differences between rates of petting and it basically the conclusion was that Essentially they claim that all dogs Are averse to very rapid touch and but that people tend to pat quickly Pat quickly, and they they showed a beautiful example of just if one just deliberately strokes the animal very slowly, the animal's eyelids just start to hood, and you basically just diffuse the tension very quickly, which I think is interesting as humans, we think, oh, we want to pat the dog on its head, and for some reason we associate patting with fast patting

or petting as a quick process.

You're going to scratch and pat this animal, where it very well could be that all the dogs out there are just dying for some really nice, slow strokes.

And I also think that that nice, slow stroke – if you're sort of in a calm emotional state yourself, then we might tap into another interesting emotion theory, which is the polyvagal theory and this concept of co -regulation.

So if you're really calm and relaxed, then you're sort of sending out these cues, these subtle cues that other individuals are reading and picking up on.

And it seems that we do that with vis -à -vis also our dogs, and certainly also horses it seems. So that just being calm and relaxed yourself can really help relax the dog.

And what you say about the fast petting or patting really makes sense to me.

I know there is one study in horses that show that if you pat a horse, many horses find that aversive.

So in other words, it's something that they'll work to avoid.

And yet, that is often how we try to reward them when they do something that we want.

They do enjoy wither scratching.

So back at the nape of the mane, if you scratch them there, they'll typically enjoy that.

But I would say that different animals, different individuals will have these individual preferences, and just trying to see what they like.

And perhaps also if you're offering your hands like this, they might even scoot around to show you which body part they want scratched once they learn the rules of that communication.

I feel like dogs want the part of their body scratched that they can't access on their own.

Yes. I'm yet to meet a dog that doesn't like being scratched on its rump.

Bum scratching is a big thing for many animals.

like the top side of their back leg, right?

Right there, it's got to feel so good because they can't get to that as well as underneath their rear leg.

Right? Like just kind of in the crook of the rear leg with that soft skin there, right?

But, having interacted with dogs that were more skittish versus more calm, I totally agree that different animals regardless of breed, just have a completely different relationship to touch and how quickly they want to interact.

I've heard and I don't know if it's true that for dogs, space is a big thing.

I don't know if this is true.

I'm sure someone will refute this, but the idea that if your dog runs up to you when you walk in or a dog runs up to you and it's a new dog you're just meeting and they touch you or they jump up on your shin.

That it's their attempt to dominate you.

Like this is my space, I'm controlling you that because you wouldn't necessarily walk up to a dog that you just met and just get right in their space without kind of them approaching you as well.

What are your thoughts on this whole dominant submission thing on the basis of touch and space?

That's like Pandora's box there right there.

Great, I don't have any stake in this.

I just would like to learn and I would like people to learn so that they can have better interactions with and for animals.

So, first of all, I think that that actually we often do walk up to strange dogs that we never met before.

We're like, hi, can I pet him?

And then we start patting on top of the animal's head.

So I think that we do do that.

And then this whole discussion about dominance is really interesting because as an ethologist, how we define dominance is completely different from how most people define it.

And I actually, I looked into the encyclopaedia to see, how is dominance defined there?

And I find that there's two, like, two lines of that definition.

So one is the ethological definition of dominance, and one is the sociological definition of dominance.

And I think that what we're doing often is that we're misusing, we're using the sociological definition on animals in a way that's, I think, unfortunate.

Because the ethological definition is about priority of access to resources.

Here's a resource, here's like five individuals coming up to it.

There's just one there.

The dominant individual will have priority of access to that resource.

The others simply have to wait, or look elsewhere.

And this reduces the risk of sort of confrontation and aggression and all the costs associated with that.

So it's just, it's normal that animals who hang out together, who are like in a stable social group will organize or have some sort of dominance hierarchy within them that allows this to take place, to reduce the risk of aggression.

It tends to become exacerbated in captivity compared to in wild contexts because then the animals can disperse, and there's like there's a resource over that they can go and get instead, but when we house them and we're offering specifically, we're offering like here's you have two cats or three cats and here's the food, you're putting the animals in conflict because cats are solitary hunters, so they actually do, if you have several cats, you should feed them in sort of separate locations to reduce that sort of heightened arousal that goes with that type of feeling.

Okay, there's dominance among dogs or among dogs and other non -human animals.

I'm thinking in terms of the relationship between human and dog and touch and space.

I've heard that if the dog touches you it thinks it owns you.

I've heard that if you move into a space that the dog is in it backs away then it thinks of you as dominant.

I've also heard that if the dog moves into your space very quickly that it sees itself as kind of the leader in this relationship.

There are a lot of theories out there about this and I'm realizing that all these theories about animals must be very contentious because they lack the language to tell us what we want to know.

So we're always sort of guessing when we're doing ethology.

I would not label any of those situations that you described as a dominance interaction, actually.

I would rather, if the dog backs away when you confront them, I would sort of rather label that as perhaps a fearful reaction, not submissive as in giving you priority of access to a resource.

Typically, feral dogs in the wild will form linear dominance hierarchies with regards to the access to resources.

And that might shift depending on what the resource is.

So it's not like it's written in stone or anything.

So it's like fluid and variable, but there's still typically some sort of like hierarchy when it comes to the priority of access to resources.

Then we have another social role which is the role as a leader and When I as an ethologist say leader, I mean the one that Leads that that sort of work walks first in line from one location to another.

I like to take the example of elephants, that when they migrate, it's typically one of the old females, the matriarch, who leads the way.

She's the leader. So she'll help them find ...

She knows where to go, essentially.

And there's other social roles as well.

There might be the controller, who is the animal who tends to initiate a change in activity.

So we see this in cows, for instance, is that all the cows are standing up and they're grazing.

And then one cow, the controller, lies down and everybody else lies down and they start ruminating.

They will often synchronize their behavior but they'll follow, it's not that one individual is sort of imposing on the others, but rather, they do that and the others follow suit.

Interesting. Yeah. I have heard this, that when you walk your dog, that your dog should be next to you or behind you.

Very few dog owners actually walk with their dog behind them.

Just, I live in an area that is, you know, frequented by dogs and owners.

It's interesting to kind of interpret that as a question, which is, if the dog walks in front, does it mean that it somehow is the leader?

I mean, are humans just completely wrong about all this stuff?

I think so, yeah. Great.

Yeah I think that we carry a lot of… actually we haven't mentioned this I think but I have very little practical experience about dogs with dogs.

I haven't lived with dogs.

I haven't trained dogs but many of my students train dogs and I help them.

But that also means that I don't carry any of these sort of assumptions that you're supposed to have your dog behind you or beside you than if you don't.

So, which means that I can look at that type of statement and go, really?

Because I think that there's a lot of learning occurring, of course, that we teach the dog that if you stay at my side or behind me, then, you know, there won't be any unpleasantness.

But if you pull ahead, I'm going to yank you back.

So there'll be an unpleasant consequence to the pulling behavior, which will then influence the animal's choice in staying next to you.

But I think we very often what we label as dominance can very often be just, if we just remove that label and we look at the animal's behavior, we can, we can explain it in other terms. And again, I would not use for me dominance as an ethologist has to do with the priority of access to resources.

So, along the lines of priority of access to resources, when I got my puppy, I was taught in the dog training course that I took with him, that I should eat and then he should eat, or that we could eat alongside one another different food, although I confess, I often fed him steak.

If it was appropriate food for a bulldog, I fed it to him.

As opposed to letting him eat before me because of this access to resources thing, is there any truth to that?

this is taught in a lot of dog slash owner training, because a lot of dog training is actually owner training.

Sure. You have to set up the situation to work for you and the animal.

But again, I would not frame that in terms of dominance.

Dogs form relationships with us.

But as far as I know, from the ecological perspective, we have no role in the dominance hierarchy among dogs.

they know that we are different and they will respond, they will learn to expect that if in this context that will happen, in that context that will happen.

And so we can often reframe that in a different learning system than dominance.

That's a novel perspective because I think that so much of what's out there in terms of dog slash owner training is really about not so much dominance, but really trying to establish a relationship where it's clear that you're the caretaker to quote -unquote make them feel safe, so that their job is very clear.

So they don't feel the anxiety of needing to perform roles that perhaps are yours.

There's a lot like what you hear when you hear about parent child training, basically.

So maybe given that sort of pattern of your answers over the last couple of questions, I should ask the question, which is a really straightforward one, which is, how do you think about animals?

like what is your view of animals when you think about them?

I know you're interested in their welfare and improving their wellbeing and conditions, but like when you see an animal most people say, well, that's a dog, that's a horse, that's a parrot.

Can I interact with it?

Maybe I don't want to, or maybe I have a phobia, who knows?

But how do you think about animals?

Like what's driving this inquiry in terms of their emotional and their cognitive life?

First of all I think that we humans are also an animal species, and that we tend to sort of put ourselves on a pedestal and thinking that we are one and then animals are like the other, as if it were homogeneous, which really isn't.

So each animal species have their own adaptation, we have our own adaptations and each animal or all the other animal species that we surround ourselves with do as well.

So, I don't know if that really answers your question, but I tend to...

So the work I do is to sort of try to help animals live better lives with humans.

And that very often starts with understanding how that animal species would live in the wild and the type of life that they have, whether they're a predator, whether they're a prey animal species, how they process the world, the type of information that they take in so for instance we might see a dog who's wagging his tail and we might think that it's only happy dogs that wag their tails but actually tail wagging is seen in many different contexts and we might think of it as a visual communication thing but actually it could be that they're disbursing scent, the tail wag will sort of, that scent

will waft over to you so you can take in information about my current emotional state.

They definitely have scent glands back there.

Oh yeah. Yeah, interesting.

So can we interpret dog wags of different types?

Is there a way to do that?

So one very interesting thing is that the dog wagging with a predominant left wag.

Left for the dog? Left for the dog.

So he's wagging on the left -hand side of his body, tends to be associated with negative emotional states.

And on the right tends to be associated with positive emotional states.

And the same, cats tend to look at the world from the left, when in a negative emotional state, and from the right, when in a positive emotional state.

So, looking from the left, meaning the left eye slightly forward, the head tilted to the right eye - So taking in that information with this eye.

If you're scary I'm going to look at you.

they're not watching, so they can't see this.

So what Carolina is describing is, if the head is turned slightly to the side, so the left eye is forward, that's a negative - So they're looking at the stimulus with their left eye, if that stimulus is fear inducing.

And the opposite to the right hand side, if it's more attractive to them or - Yeah, so this is lateralized.

Interesting, and then the tail wag, you said a dog wagging on the left hand side, more negative, right hand side, and more - What about full sweeps?

Yeah, full sweeps. And I don't know the details here, but certainly the type of tail wag, whether it's sort of very low and fast or whether it's high and sort of stiff will communicate different emotional states.

Do you think that over time we learn these signals without realizing that we learn these signals?

Yes, absolutely. Because we associate it with our dog being in a particular circumstance or behaving in a certain way.

So studies have shown that we humans are actually, we learn to read dogs by exposure, even passive exposure, just living in an environment and apparently if we live in a culture where dogs live close with humans we get better in reading dogs and then in cultures where dogs don't interact that much with humans.

So there's that. And there's also the issue that we are typically better at reading gross body language than we are at reading facial expressions.

Apparently, one of the reasons being that dogs move different facial muscles when they make emotional facial expressions, they move different muscles than what humans do.

What can you tell us about the facial expressions of dogs?

Well, there's been some studies in the last couple of years that have looked at which muscles are moving when in which contexts so So they'll expose the dog to different types of stimuli And they'll look at they'll film the dog and look at what what muscles are twitching where where is Where's the face moving in response to these stimuli?

So those types of studies have found that that you know when you when a dog is exposed to let's say Thunder or firework sounds they will show a certain facial configuration when their owner returns home after not being seen for several hours.

They all show a different facial configuration and so on.

So it seems that they do show facial expressions, it's just that some of those facial expressions are...

it's not the same muscles that we show in the corresponding emotional state.

So that would I think bias us to mis -reading dogs' facial expressions from that perspective, but then again, if we live with dogs, we won't observe just the facial expression.

We will observe the entire dog.

And we're often better off reading their body language than we are reading their facial expression, even though I think that studies also show that the face is where we look first. Which behaviors in dogs are maintained from interactions with other dogs when they interact with humans.

For instance, if one is gonna take a dog out on a walk and it's familiar with the sound of the leash coming off the hook or something like that, it's not uncommon for a dog to go into that long, full, you know, front leg stretch that people call down dog, you know, in yoga.

And some people will say that's a kind of remnant of the puppy play kind of stance.

Again, people say this stuff.

People are often self -appointed dog experts.

This is kind of interesting and I've learned this from researching online that the various camps of, quote, unquote, dog experts disagree vehemently with each other.

I mean, they write to me saying, you know, they're evil.

This person is cruel.

You know, they blame each other of animal cruelty for different training tools.

We'll talk about that a little bit later.

But dogs will do this down dog type movement, whatever it means with other dogs, and they'll do it with humans.

Do you think it means the same thing in those two different contexts?

Most probably does.

That play bough that you're describing is what's referred to as a meta -signal for play.

So it's typically shown in a play context and I haven't seen it described, but then again, I'm not a dog owner, but I haven't seen it described in the context of let's go for a walk but certainly in the play context as far as I know dogs play a bit differently with humans than they do with other dogs but they do enjoy playing with humans and sometimes I think we humans have a hard time knowing whether what we're seeing is play or aggression because there will be elements from the aggressive repertoire within a play bow but typically what we can do then is look for what's referred to as MARS, M

A R S. So M being the metasignals, so those play bows, or in other species it will be other behaviors that are sort of indicating that I want to play.

I know chimpanzees have like 30 or 50 different metasignals for play.

M AA is for activity shift, so we will see different behaviors they might be chasing, they might be pouncing, they might be wrestling, biting each other.

But you'll see these activity shifts and it's not in the same order as it would be if they were truly fighting.

M A R. R is for role reversals.

So you'll see that the dog, the dogs, if they're of different sizes or different sort of stamina or how big they are, how competent fighters they are would be, that they'll take turns winning and losing.

Yeah, I've seen that.

Yeah, because it's not fun playing if you lose all the time.

So in order to keep playing the bigger dog needs to lose sometimes so they need to, in order to keep this interaction going, that's the way to do that.

And the last one, S, is self -handicap.

So the larger dog will self -handicap themselves.

So you might see them doing a tug of war and the large dog is just standing there and holding the thing and a small dog is like pulling and really trying to get the thing.

And the big dog is just standing there doing nothing.

But then if a human takes over the toy and starts pulling then the big dog will engage and start showing more of his strength and escalate that behavior.

That's a beautiful thing when you see animals adjusting their level of kind of vigor in play so that the play can continue.

That is very sweet.

I mean, it speaks to a bigger question, which is, do dogs have empathy?

Oh, I think so absolutely.

I can't say I've seen any studies on it, but just, yeah.

I mean, I think - I think so.

Many dog owners are familiar with when we're grieving.

A dog will often come closer as opposed to moving further away.

I mean, I've seen some incredible moments.

You know, we interpret these things, right?

We anthropomorphize, but I had someone in my home years ago who was grieving a death in her family and Kostel came and put a paw on her knee.

And it's hard to not interpret that as a meaningful moment of empathy.

And who knows what he was experiencing.

Maybe he was experiencing distress for all I know, but the more pleasant interpretation is that he wanted to extend comfort.

I think it makes sense from the evolutionary perspective that social animals who live in a cohesive social group are good at reading each other's emotional state and also good at sort of trying to buffer negative emotions if it's possible to do that.

And so I would expect it with the any of the sort of more cognitively advanced species I would expect some type of empathy.

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I've always been delighted and curious about the fact that if two animals of the same species receive food or a treat it seems I don't know but it seems that they are paying attention to how much treat the other is getting and as a sibling I have an older sister who I get along very well with and always have but when we were kids I'll never forget like if there was a treat like a milkshake or something she would point out that she had slightly more than I did.

If there was a slice of cake or something, as much as we would look at the slice of cake being served to us, we were looking to see how much the other one got.

And this was a reflexive thing.

And we're not competitive in any dimension, really.

We've always respected each other's strengths and weaknesses in a way that's very complimentary.

But when it comes to treats, Humans and dogs pay a lot of attention to who's getting what.

Fairness, yeah. There was this experiment done on Capuchin monkeys by Frans de Waal and his team, and apparently they did it and they published a paper on it and you know nobody read it and then like a decade later in preparation for a presentation they redid some of the experiment and and filmed it and he shared that on the presentation.

I don't know if you've seen it but essentially it's two Capuchin monkeys and they're next to one another so they can each see what the other is getting and they're asked to do a task like give a...

the researcher hands them a rock and they hand it back to the researcher and then they get a reinforcer so a treat as payment for that behavior.

And so the first monkey gets a piece of cucumber and he's happy, he eats that cucumber and then the the researcher turns towards the second monkey and requests the same behavior, gets the same behavior and feeds that animal a grape.

And capuchins are not too enthusiastic about cucumbers but they really love grapes so when she then turns back to the first monkey again and repeats the behavior and again feeds that one a cucumber that he was happy to eat like 30 seconds ago he actually throws a tantrum and throws it back at the researcher sort of going I saw that you fed the other guy a grape and the audience is laughing so it's like I think we all recognize that situation that we take a front to somebody else getting paid better for the same quality of work.

Yeah, I'm always interested in these studies that every few years, something I didn't know that one.

So thank you for sharing that, where there's something about resource allocation that's revealed.

And then for every one of those, there'll be a study that shows for instance, I'm not gonna get the details right here, but that crows will teach each other ways to open boxes so that another one can get food even if they don't have access to that food.

Just, it seems like an act of altruism.

So we'll see fairness, we'll see altruism.

A very different picture than this whole notion of dominance hierarchies in every member of a species is just trying to get the most that they possibly can even at the expense of others.

It's beautiful in a way, and we again have to be careful not to anthropomorphize to not assume that members of a species are doing this because they're benevolent.

That's a nice, I like that interpretation.

But maybe as you pointed out before that having a happy group makes for more happiness for oneself.

I think if the group is doing well, then everybody's better off.

So there's, we used to think that there was just sort of individual selection, but there is a certain amount of group selection also.

The individual selection is stronger, but certainly if there's a group that collaborates better that will do better than the group that isn't collaborating as well.

And it's interesting you've mentioned a few times now the risk of anthropomorphism and I think that if we look at that as a sort of a continuum from anthropomorphism, which we might then define as, you know, thinking that animals are just the same as humans, It's only just that they have some fur, so they're a bit different, but more or less the same.

And on the other side is what we might refer to as anthropo denial.

That was a term coined also by Frans de Waal, the one with the Coppuccino experiment.

Where we don't recognize that in fact there are commonalities between humans and other animal species.

and I think that we in our sort of fear of anthropomorphism we have fallen into anthropo denial and I think that the answer is probably somewhere in the middle that we do share lots of commonalities with animals I think that for instance even though our perception of the world might be really different how we process that information and the types of emotional and mood responses changes in mood that we get in response to the environment are very much the same although it will be different stimuli that different animal species pay attention to that are more or less relevant to them, depending on which species

it is. But I think that we've fallen into, we've so avoided this topic of anthropomorphism.

We've been so afraid of it that we've fallen into the other trap which is sort of denying that they have anything to do What can you do with us?

Let's talk about a species that can be divisive, cats.

Oh. My sister has cats and I don't mind them.

I can't say I gravitate toward them, but I don't dislike them.

Yeah. You do own a cat.

Yep. And you're an animal ethologist. Tell us about cats from the perspective of an animal ethologist. When you look at a cat, what are you looking for to tell you something about whether or not it's a friendly cat?

I mean, obviously if it's hair's standing up on its back and it's arching and it's hissing, that's obvious, but what are you looking at in the context of the way that cats evolved and their species in general?

So the common house cat that we have today as a pet, evolved as a solitary hunter, but that aggregates in social groups, loose social groups, so they sort of hang out together, but it's not this really...

cohesive group and they hunt on their own, so they'll eat on their own also.

And me as an ethologist, what I tend to do when I look at an animal species is I look at three things I look at their social environment so typically with cats I would then say that they you know they should if they are raised well so they've had had the opportunity of spending enough time with mom typically it should be up to 14 weeks which I think that we see that in Sweden nowadays I don't know how it is here in the US but that seems to be long enough for the animal to actually learn how to be a cat so that they don't get too emotionally disturbed by the separation once we wean them and sort

of put them in a new environment so so just looking at the social bit is one thing that i do the first thing that i do the second thing that i do is i look at how do they get food so again cats are solitary hunters so i would look into ways of...

and they... as opposed to dogs, cats typically retain the whole hunting sequence.

Sometimes the killing bite isn't quite there.

But certainly the grab bite.

And the fact that some cats will, if they're...

it's an outdoor cat, that they might bring their prey back home is to me is simply...

it's not that they want to gift you with their their their kill but rather that they feel safe in so they're simply bring bringing their Their prey to a place where they feel safe.

So it's not a gift we can put that one to rest I wouldn't say I I would not call that a gift now I had a girlfriend in graduate school and her cat would catch these very large mice and Put them in our shoes At night it was dreadful Would the cat put them in the shoes or would the mice hide in the shoes?

Well they were dead when we found them.

So I'm assuming that the cat would put them in the shoes.

The cat also loved to retrieve tin foil balls.

Little tin foil balls.

I've never seen a cat retrieve.

At first I wasn't too enthusiastic about the cat.

And then I developed a really close relationship with it.

At least from my side.

I thought it was a close relationship.

And he would catch mice, put them in our shoes at night while we slept.

That's pretty unpleasant.

You had to check your shoes in the morning.

So those weren't gifts?

I would not assume that they were gifts.

No, from what I know, cats will sort of bring back what they catch to a place where they feel safe.

Then they often lose interest if it's not moving anymore.

And obviously if your cat or that cat killed the mice, that cat had progressed to the actual killing bite.

Many cats don't do that.

They only have the grab bites so they'll just let the little rotor go to run off.

I've seen that with a play with them, right, Dale?

So they'll let it go and if the mouse is still, they can actually sort of escape attention because the animal, the cat might grow bored and walk away.

But the moment they start moving again then they're sort of restarting that whole predatory sequence again.

But back to your question about how to interact with cats, or whether, how to read them.

So that would be the third thing that I'm looking at, is how do the animal species in front of me, how do they respond to perceived threat?

and I'm saying perceived threat here because sometimes we are well intended we're like hi and we want to hug them because we're primates and they really don't like that so they will respond to us as if we were a predator and I think that again comes down very much to the types of social interactions of the type of learning that the animal has had when they're really young, so for instance there's a study showing that if you handle young kittens between the ages of like two and eight weeks for at least an hour a day and and when I say handle I just mean that sort of interact with them and and play

and have them sort of on your lap and so on, they will become very social as adults, so they will be the type of cat that will jump up into your lap and fall asleep, purring.

So if you interact with that young kitten less than like 15 minutes a day, they won't be fearful of humans, but they'll be more like walking up to you and saying hi, and then walking away.

The aloof cat. The aloof cat.

Yeah. So, so I think the early life experiences can really shape the type of temperament, if you will, or how sort of vigorously animals respond to changes in the environment.

So what is this behavior where the cat bumps its head against you or your arm?

Is it to spread smell?

Yeah, I would say that is scent marking.

And when they're scent marking you, why are they scent marking?

I would think that it's like something you do in your group.

You do mutual scent marking, which means that everybody in the group smells more or less the same.

So it's a way of sort of greeting and incorporating the others in the group.

So there'll be a lot of scent exchange within this type of species living in the group.

That would be my guess as to why they do that.

So is scent marking about territory as well?

Like if a cat, you know, scent marks in corners?

Oh yeah, that's a different, that's typically not that...

Because they have like multiple scent glands in the face.

And one of them is used to scentmark sort of the inner territory.

And this is where they feel really safe, and then they usually have this urine scentmarking which is in the out, sort of the outskirts of the territory.

And you might see this if you, for instance, you have an indoor cat and they start peeing you bring out a piece of paper and a layout of your house or apartment and you start sort of putting a little ring to where you find the the pea that will give you a lot of information because if if it's a territorial thing it will typically be at the edges also at the windows or doors if it's a an elimination problem that the cat has sort of maybe perhaps it hurts when he piece, so then he learns to associate pain with going in the box and so the box starts representing painful experiences, so he will start

going outside of the box, but that type of behavior will be seen in that context instead.

Interesting. Um, so if your cat is urinating inside, you now have a, an experiment to run.

The use of a litter box is a pretty interesting one to me.

It's not what I spent a lot of time thinking about, but if you sort of step back in and I say, okay, here's this animal that we've domesticated and it readily learns how to cover its waste.

Which is very different than a dog, which can be trained to withhold until you go out on a walk.

That's basically the two different strategies there.

And I don't know what it is if you own a monkey or something else.

But what is it about the covering of waste behavior?

Is that something in cats?

Is that a natural behavior they do in the wild?

And if they roam, why do they bother?

And then sort of tacked to this is that with dogs, oftentimes after they eliminate waste, they'll step away from it and kick dirt in the general direction.

And I've heard it interpreted two ways.

One is that they're trying to spread scent and the other is that they're trying to cover waste.

So again, this is why I was interested in talking to an animal ethologist as opposed to a pet behavioral trainer, right?

I'm also interested in that, but I think we have to, again, acknowledge that much of the interpretation that we have about animals' behavior is just human interpretation.

So, what is this covering of waste?

Do we know what it's for in the wild, in cats?

The covering of waste is a way to sort of reduce the risk of infection.

I would assume that they also don't eliminate close to where they eat, so if we have a house, a cat in our house, we shouldn't have the litter box next to the food, which I wish I had known where I had my first cat 20 years ago because she had that very set up for the food right next to the litter box.

And I would also assume that the behaviour of dogs when they sort of kick at their poop typically, right, not pee, that it's a and the behavior would look very different, I think.

But I haven't seen any sort of, any scientific study on that topic.

Okay, so cat owners take note, separate the food from the litter box by some distance.

I was always somewhat surprised, although less so over time, how much determination and effort my bulldog would put into peeing on things on walks.

I feel like it was one of his great joys in life.

There I go again, anthropomorphizing.

But to smell something, and then pee there.

He seemed to have an endless supply of urine for this.

It was really remarkable.

You know, as a scientist and someone who loves dogs and loved him more than words, I just was like, this is amazing.

Like, he loves this behavior.

And he's also reading the pee mail from the other dogs in the neighborhood.

celebrate. So the urine tells a lot of information to the other animals.

It tells what gender, what reproductive state, perhaps also something about the animal's emotional state or mental state.

So I wouldn't hesitate to say that that was one of the joys of life for dogs that they, after all, that's how they communicate.

And they spend a lot of time doing it and they're willing to work to get access to that opportunity.

So absolutely, I would think I think that it gives them positive emotional experiences doing that.

So there's some innate drive in, in dogs, it seems to read the emotional and hormonal states of other dogs that have been, been there.

To me, it felt like their form of social media, like I'm gonna post here.

What are other people posting here?

What's going on? I mean, clearly there's some brain real estate devoted to this behavior.

I'm not being facetious, Because I mean, I look at a human brain, 40 % of that real estate is for vision.

Another 40%, it's mixed in there with other stuff is for motor behavior.

We have neural real estate for smelling and certainly for touch. But even if you're a massage therapist or you do touch based work, even if you're a real estate for these other things is vastly larger, except for the blind person where the visual stuff is taken over by the tactile stuff in auditory.

So amount of real estate correlates.

So when I see a behavior that's like, this is one of the main things dogs do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty striking.

So dogs descended from, they were domesticated from wolves, correctly.

Did that happen at independent locations around the Earth?

Don't really know the answer to that question.

But it seems that they domesticated themselves that it was sort of wolves that started hanging out next to human habitation and that it was sort of the the least fearful and the sort of most explorative wolves that dared do this.

So it was it was it wasn't that we caught wolves and said, aha, I'm going to breed you But it was rather that, it was like a symbiotic relationship that developed over time.

Interesting. I don't know of any other species that does that, except maybe like certain fish or dolphins that follow fishing boats so they can get some of the catch. But that's different because, I see these Instagram videos of like an otter jumping on a kayak and there's some interaction that's regular.

You know, the person goes out on their kayak.

They interact with this otter.

so animals will do this, but usually there's some sort of food, it just sounds like food payoff and safety is really the key.

Does that mean that animals at a very basic level are looking to optimize food intake and safety?

And what does that tell us about zoos?

I personally have a pretty strong visceral reaction to zoos that have large carnivores.

I realized we could have a discussion about elephants too, but I feel like large carnivores housed in zoos create some issues for me, I won't go into what this is, but I'm also here that zoos have positive breeding programs, endangered species protection programs, but what's your take on zoos?

When we talk about zoos, it's perhaps good to talk about the evolution of zoos because back in the day, like 150 years ago, it used to be more or less a menagerie, that here's a lion and here's an elephant here's a zebra and they were in little small cages and the only thing that you did was see the animal really.

Zoos today tend to have the purpose of doing a lot of conservation work.

So there's what's referred to as in -situ conservation where you work to preserve wild habitat and creating national parks et cetera.

and sort of giving the opportunities for reintroduction of species and so on.

And there's ex situ conservation, which is then housing those animal species that are threatened with extinction in an environment.

And ideally that environment should then be good enough to promote species typical behavior and so on.

I mean, I'm conflicted.

I think that many zoos are sort of doing a lot of good in this effort and also educating the public.

And I think that many people who go to zoos, that might awaken in them an interest in animals, which I think is a good thing that we care about animals.

But also that sometimes the housing isn't optimal.

and certainly some species are a lot more difficult to keep in captivity compared to others.

So polar bears are really difficult to keep because they're ranging carnivores.

They walk miles and miles and miles and it's really difficult to provide those species specific opportunities in captivity compared to other carnivores who have more of a different What type of approach to predation?

One of the things that really turned me on to just how more sophisticated cat species are than I ever assumed was something that happened when I was a postdoc also at Stanford. I was a member of the San Francisco zoo.

The San Francisco Zoo is an outdoor zoo.

By comparison to most other zoos I've been to, and I haven't been to that many, but it's It's a pretty nice landscape.

There's an outdoor lemur, I call it an exhibit, but an indoor outdoor lemur thing that's really amazing.

There's some giraffes, all this.

Well, around the time I was in, when I was a postdoc, I'll just briefly tell the story.

I was at the movies in San Francisco and I stepped out to get something to drink and the kid behind the counter said, a tiger escaped from the San Francisco Zoo and is killing people.

and I thought, wow, that's crazy.

It turns out that was only partially true.

What had happened is there was a tiger there, Tatiana, who, they used to have these moats around the tiger enclosure.

And it was very close to Christmas, people can look this up and get the details.

And there were a couple of kids who were throwing either pine cones or throwing something at the tigers.

The zoo was near shutting down.

Tatiana either ran up or jumped the moat.

I don't know how she did it, got out and moved through the crowd.

This is the, to me, the interesting part.

Moved through the crowd, completely ignoring most of the people that were around, centered in on and killed one of the kids, then moved to the second kid, worked him pretty well.

The authorities showed up, killed Tatiana.

This opened up a whole discussion in the zoo community, raised a lot of kind of complicated questions about enclosures, et cetera.

The enclosures there by the way now are very different.

They have these high glass as well.

And of course the ending was sad for everybody.

I took a break from my membership there.

I reactivated a few years later.

They know I don't, that tiger, obviously is gone.

But I still am conflicted about this whole picture.

What's interesting to me is the intentionality of the tiger.

So this was not a bloodthirsty tiger that just wanted to kill humans or eat humans.

It was those two humans that pissed her off and those two humans were gonna pay, and they paid.

The family sued the zoo and then it was a whole thing.

I don't know how it ended up with the lawsuit, but it was a whole thing.

so people can look this up online.

When you hear that, that a tiger did that, as opposed to just going into a frenzy the way humans sometimes go into a frenzy, attacking whoever and as many people as possible, what do you think?

What does it tell us about tigers and their consciousness?

I think we often don't give animals enough credit.

But to me, it's not surprising that she experienced something really unpleasant that she came to associate with two individuals, and that generated a negative emotional state and aggressive behavior that she then carried out directed towards those two people.

Does it surprise you how directed it was?

No. I mean, there were plenty of people around that were an easier kill.

I would think that a fearful animal might lash out at anyone, but an animal that is angry tends to be more premeditated in a way.

Calculated. Calculated in a way.

So I would expect that if you had scared the tiger, she might show defensive aggression, and which is just lashing out at whoever is closest. But this was offense, offensive aggression.

And so that is premeditated.

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Can we talk a little bit about the prey and stalking and capture and killing sequence.

One of the things that I've always been fascinated by is when a, let's just use a cat as an example, could be large cat, could be small cat, is in its stalking mode that it essentially gets one ballistic strike opportunity before the chase is on, or the animal gets away, or it gets caught, right?

And we'll see the, we had a cat when I was a kid that would stalk, so obviously like creep up, and then right before it would leap at the prey, it would start shattering its teeth.

I'm assuming that was behavioral suppression or something leaking through, what's going on when an animal does that very deliberate stalking, that calculation and the like teeth chatters or like twitching is starting to occur, what is that?

My guess would be perhaps some sort of sort of displacement behavior that there's motivation to move on in the sequence of behaviors to the next behavior, but it's not quite time yet.

And so that sort of activation then gets an outlet through that behavior.

But I really don't know, I don't know.

I haven't seen this discussed.

So it's almost like a hydraulic pressure or something.

Interesting. Interesting.

We've talked about dogs.

We've talked about cats.

Let's talk about birds.

Okay. I had parrots when I was a kid.

They were domestically bred.

Little gray cheek dwarf parrots.

It didn't turn out poorly, it didn't turn out great.

They were - I didn't clip their wings because I couldn't bring myself to - and they flew around my room a lot and shitted around the room a lot and threw a lot of food on the ground a lot and eventually made sense to give them to somebody who had an aviary.

Parrots are smart, yeah?

Yeah. What are parrots thinking about?

I think what all animals are thinking about, whether a next meal is gonna come from, social interactions and whether there's any threat anywhere.

Is that really like 90 % of their conscious life?

I would say, I would say that if the animal doesn't feel safe, then it's very hard to engage the animal in any type of, sort of, view.

If an animal is fearful you try to feed them, they often won't take food for instance.

So the sense of safety has a very high priority, because if you don't feel safe you could die essentially.

So if you're in a situation where you don't feel safe, it's because that situation is potentially dangerous, there could be predators around and then you must focus your attention on those predators because otherwise you're gonna die.

And that of course depends on the species.

Some species sort of aggregate in big flocks, if we're talking birds, and some are pair -bonding species, but the social environment is really important both with regards to, you know, behavior so sexual behavior parenting behavior raising young and so on all of that also has high priority because it's essentially about feathering your genes into the next generation and then and then foraging behaviors where am i gonna get my next meal we feed them on a plate we're thinking like we we think that we're doing them a service like here's here's your food on the plate you don't have to do anything but they

come equipped to actually show their food getting repertoire of behaviors.

So typically if we don't allow them to show those behaviors, we might see some problem behaviors popping up instead because they will redirect that, that energy, that intention into, I don't know, did you have any problems with the animal, sort of the birds, you know, ripping your carpet or do you think it's?

Oh, they destroyed everything.

I mean, they destroyed...

They took great pleasure in ripping everything.

So I would think that is - Books, covers, yeah.

Photos - Foraging behavior directed towards the wrong thing.

Yeah, I don't recommend anyone owned parrots frankly, that was an experiment gone wrong.

Luckily there, I think there's still a lot, they live a very long time.

Oh. And people can look up the Ecuadorian gray cheek dwarf parrots, they have this beautiful orange under their wings, they have little gray cheeks and they were called pocket parrots, at that the excitement for me at that, I was young and I was probably 11, was that I'd be able to like carry them around in my pocket.

They didn't want to do that at all.

Anyway, it's interesting to think about this need for animals to express their natural repertoire of behaviors.

For dog owners, I think the common practice is to, you know, put out a bowl of food.

Would we be better off bringing the food to a park and going to the park and then having them eat there?

or somehow incorporating the roaming and prey -seeking behavior.

I mean, how would one incorporate that into a more pleasant experience for the dog?

Cause what you're saying makes total sense.

They need to express these behaviors.

They're not, if they can't, it's gonna come out some other way and maybe the destructive to them or the environment, yeah.

Essentially, I think that for dog owners, that what we can do is we can try to promote the different aspects of the predatory sequence that that particular dog in front of us enjoys doing.

I mentioned nose work as being one of the things that many dogs really enjoy and interestingly, and this is just sort of the early days of scientific studies on the effects of nose work are really promising that one of the effects of nose work seems to be.

So if you're not familiar with it it's essentially that the animal has learned that he needs to find a specific scent in an area and so he sniffs the area, he roams the area and he follows the scent and he'll stop and mark when he finds the scent and then he gets a reinforcer.

So he gets rewarded for doing that.

So that's essentially more or less a setup and it seems that it helps regulate arousal, so that animals who are sort of, highly -strung and almost...

generalised anxiety calm down and the ones that are sort of, semi -depressed get, sort of, more enthusiastic about life and also if we're back in core effect space again, we have this shift to the right -hand side of the core effect space, so we have positive valence associated with that.

And it seems really interesting, early days still, because this dog sport is like just, I don't know, 15 years old or something.

It's not very, not very old.

So essentially, what we can do is we can, every dog could do nosework.

I think that would be an interesting sort of an outlet for that very first part of the behavior sequence.

And then I know that Some trainers are working specifically to help dogs who chase wildlife for instance.

And it's about teaching the dog to stay in the first parts of the predatory sequence, to do the sniffing, the pointing and the eyeing behavior, and they get reinforced for that so many times so that it becomes like a feedback loop that they see a deer running across the road and they go mom i saw a deer and they get reinforced for that.

so and other dogs like greyhounds love chasing that you allow them to do that and then other dogs that really allow sort of that really enjoy carrying things that you allow them to do that and then give your poodle an old, something to rip apart, you know.

Dis -embowel. Dis -embowel things.

Poodles like to kill and do too.

The post kill ripping apart.

Yeah, ripping apart.

Gosh, the name and the look of a poodle suggests a much more docile animal.

So they really like to rip bodies apart.

Yeah, as far as I understand, yes.

And that makes sense, given what I understand about the dosing of different genes.

Also I would, you know, rather than serving food on a plate you might try a scatter feeding or feeding it in a way that the animal actually has to work for it.

So do some, one of these snuffle mats, you hide the food in there.

So they have to actually spend some time looking for the food before consuming it.

Because otherwise, if you serve it in a bowl, some animals, simply, they inhale it, it takes like 30 seconds and they're done.

Costello ate like a seagull.

Yeah. Really, he wouldn't chew his food.

Yeah, it's interesting, the dog food training, animal health world sells lots of things where you can put food inside of an object where they have to really work hard at it.

I had mixed, you know, sort of mixed results with that because I have heard that in addition to exercise and wanting your proximity that animals, dogs in particular perhaps, really need that cognitive work, that they get bored and they really need the challenge of working their mind.

So much so that on rainy days, when you like if weather's really bad and you can't go out, that they need an immense amount of kind of like search and forage type behavior.

So I would strive to do that.

And I know some people might hear this and just think, this is crazy, like my dog just wants to curl up at my feet and it just wants to fetch the ball, but that's for fetching breeds.

if I threw a ball to Costello, he would go to it and then just sit on top of it.

He had no interest whatsoever in doing anything with that in terms of retrieving it, but he would love to, love to tug.

So just, you know, if I tied a rope to a tree, for instance, he would jump on there and hold on and I could swing him by his body weighted, you know, 90 pounds and he'd stay up there for 10 minutes.

Like the pleasure of chewing was clearly the strongest innate drive.

So I think what I'm realizing is that understanding the sequence of natural behaviors, but also where in that sequence a particular breed really leans to.

Absolutely. Yeah. So sometimes it can be hard to know where your dog is on that scale, especially if it's like a mixed breed of some type.

And then you can often actually just look at the conformation of the dog.

So those very lean, I'm thinking greyhound now, the lean dog with not much muscle and very pointy snout tends to be the chasers and the ones with more muscles, front muscles and bigger jaws tend to be the ones that rip things apart.

Bulldogs, rottweilers, mastiffs.

And some of the smaller ones, the pugs, the French bulldogs, I think people don't appreciate how the breeding down because people now, a lot of people have dogs who live in apartments, you know, smaller dogs.

Although there's this weird thing, you talk to a vet.

I'm a family member who's a vet.

You say, what's a great apartment dog?

And they'll say Great Dane because they don't need a ton of space to roam.

But as you have to walk them, but they don't need long walks compared to like a little terrier sometimes needs to just go, go, go, go, go.

I mean, needs two hours or more of activity.

I think you need to pay a lot of attention to the type of life that you're gonna offer, whether it's living in an apartment in a busy city Or whether it's, you know, on a farm somewhere, which breed of dog is going to adapt best to that lifestyle.

Do you think dogs like cities?

I think many dogs get very stressed in cities because of the constant bombardment of sensory information.

So there's noise, there's dogs.

So if you're out walking on the street, there's constantly meeting strangers.

And for many animal species meeting strangers a doesn't happen very often and B causes an increase in arousal because it could be you know a friend or foe, it could be some someone that you want to fight with, it could be someone you want to have sex with, you need to assess the situation.

And I think that that dogs are quite unique in that respect and that they have a high tolerance for strangers because many other animal species do not, and I think that we tend to forget that sometimes.

That we introduce animals to animals that they don't know, we expect them to get along and they don't.

That type of introduction needs to be done really carefully.

Typically we might start with just exchanging sense.

So if you have one cat and want to get a second cat, for instance, they typically won't just accept the other the way that two dogs might do for instance.

So then you might have them in different rooms and you might rub one cat with one towel and rub one the other cat with another towel and then exchange towels.

And then you might want to gradually incorporate other sensory modalities too so that they'll start hearing each other and finally that they start seeing each other.

And then at the end the tactile, so the actual physical contact.

And if you do it that way you reduce the risk that they'll actually start fighting when you do the introduction because if you just put them together, they might just escalate to aggression right away.

But if you do it gradually, that exchange of information will help them sort of figure out who the other is and reduce the risk of aggression.

Well, I think I've always been fascinated by, and there's a little bit of data starting to emerge on this as to what the mechanisms might be, is self versus other species recognition.

Most notably that dogs, unless it's a dominance behavior, don't try to mate with cats, for instance.

They might hump, but that's a separate thing.

They're actually separate circuits.

My colleague David Anderson at Caltech did a really beautiful study.

Can I just, the takeaway shows that there are separate circuits in the brain for mounting behavior for sex versus mounting behavior for dominance.

And the mounting behavior for dominance circuits exist in males and females of a species where only the male mounts for purposes of reproduction.

So this notion of mounting as a dominance behavior is a very real thing even in mice.

In any case, the setting mounting for dominance behavior aside, AKA humping, it's remarkable, like a horse doesn't try and mate with a dog.

Different species of animals seem to know self versus other.

They don't have to learn it from their mom Yeah.

Or dad. Or us. It's innate.

It's innate. Yeah. For most species.

There's actually a few exceptions being, what comes to mind is certain water fowl birds.

Where a female, and I can't say which species now, but some species of water bird. The female recognises the male innately, but the male learns through sexual imprinting when they're young to sort of be attracted to females that resemble the female that reared them.

And essentially this is because in, in those species, the males are typically very ornamented and sort of really fabulous looking and the females are cryptic, they're like camouflaged, so they're like brown so the males need to learn what mum looks like and when they grow up they'll start courting females that look like mum and so if you raise such a male with the wrong species they'll start courting the wrong female and of course she won't be interested because she, he doesn't look like her golden standard of what a male of that species is supposed to look like.

It's so interesting, as a kid who had aquaria, you can tell I've had a lot of different animals, you know, I never successfully bred fish in captivity.

I tried to breed cuttlefish in captivity in my lab, that didn't work, although I successfully raised them, but I got really into freshwater discus for a while and tried very hard to get a breeding tank going.

It's a very difficult, but occasionally, someone in the aquarium community that I was a part of would succeed in getting breeding between discus fish, but you never, ever, ever see an instance of like a discus fish trying to fertilize the eggs of a different species of fish.

They just know. And it's gotta be for them odorant or presumably mixed sensory.

It's really a striking aspect of even my friends who study flies.

So if they study Gysophila of one particular type, the one type of fruit fly will not try to mate with another type of fruit fly, and they look very similar to you and me.

So there's something really powerful there.

There's inbreeding avoidance is sort of a mechanism that prevents many animal species from mating with someone who's too genetically similar to yourself since we get this inbreeding depression but there's also don't waste your time mating with someone that you can't even produce offspring.

However, one other exception that came to mind was ungulates.

sometimes and I have this memory of being, I was in Africa back in 1995 at the Chinfunji wildlife orphanage, walking chimps into the forest to sort of rehabilitate them and they had a young duiker there which is a very small like yay high antelope kind of thing who had been orphaned and raised bottle raised and sexually imprinted on humans so he came up and started you know humping me more or less thinking that I was his kind.

So that type of sexual imprinting is when predominantly I think males learn they imprint sexually on the type of individual that raised them.

So that's the type of individual that they will then later also try to court.

I think Conrad Lawrence had also in his, one of his books, he described some sort of corvid species who he also raised from young and who started courting his secretary or someone.

And the interesting story there was the courting behavior in this bird is...

vomiting, you know leaving like a present and offering food in any open surface, or orifice.

So he would try to sort of get her to open her mouth and when she didn't he would go and and leave the present in her ear instead.

Disgusting. People can offset their disgust by, we'll provide a link to the a now very famous picture of Conrad Lorenz who won the Nobel Prize, I believe, for his discoveries about imprinting where the geese would imprint on him.

It's him swimming in a lake with the trail of baby geese behind him, the goslings behind him.

So that's the other type of imprinting you're talking about.

That's filial imprinting.

So there are two types.

There's the sexual imprinting where you learn who to mate with.

And there's the filial imprinting where you sort of learn who to feel safe with and they start following that individual.

Which is what dogs do with us.

Actually I would say that dogs don't imprint on humans, they grow attachment bonds to humans.

What's the difference?

So imprinting is typically a very fast process, it occurs within minutes or hours, attachment takes longer and involves more senses.

So imprinting tends to be, I think visual, I'm not mistaken, perhaps all factorial in some species.

And attachment has previously mostly been studied in humans.

So this bond that grows between caregiver and offspring.

What's interesting also is that attachment bond will grow in different ways depending on how the caregiver responds to the young one's needs, essentially.

So you can have a secure attachment bond where the caregiver very reliably responds to the needs of the young one so that if they find themselves alone they can self -regulate better, so their nervous system can more easily calm down again after a stressor than if they are secure or insecurely attached.

And so it seems that dogs form, rather than imprinting on humans, they form a type of attachment bond and they can also be securely or insecurely attached to their persons.

That's going to open up a whole set of ideas for people because this whole notion of secure, insecure, and then the D babies and the classic bolving experiments that we've talked about before on this podcast, where this kind of disorganized responses is something that is thrown around a lot nowadays in dating culture, relationship, pop psychology culture, like our people, is he or she securely attached?

Is he or she avoidant?

Is he or she anxious attached?

Guess what folks, it's also in your pets.

So now you can start to get into that.

In those classic experiments of bulby, just to summarize very briefly, mother and, it was typically mother, although other caretakers now have been tested, but mother and child are separated.

there's a predictable, understandable, and healthy anxiety response that occurs.

If the conditions are right, the kid eventually comes to play and relax a bit.

If the conditions aren't right, they don't, that's all healthy.

But the real test is on reunion with mom.

And also how they respond to a stranger.

Right, the strange situation test, right?

Do they feel comforted?

And how do they approach mom when mom comes back?

Is it eager to see and relax?

Is it uncertain? Is it avoidant?

That's what this test is about.

Yeah, yeah. Or clingy also.

So the same types of experiments have been done on dogs.

And it's been found that certain dogs are sort of in securely attached.

They'll be clingy or avoidant and some are securely attached.

So they'll be sort of more explorative.

They'll recover quicker from the separation.

and so this is great.

So if people drop off their dog at the dog sitter when they travel and then come back, the reunion tells you a lot about how that dog feels.

Yeah. Sadly, I think that, and I'm not sure that I have any backup in any scientific studies here, but I suspect at least that probably early weaning, predisposed dogs to insecure attachment.

In this country, the typical idea is that puppies can be separated from their mother at about eight weeks.

Do you feel that's too early?

Yeah, as an ethologist, sort of looking at how the species live in the wild, what type of social interactions they have, and how can we best provide an environment to sort of promote natural behavior, for me, eight weeks is way too early.

So we have some studies from the, don't know, 60s or something, where I think two researchers called Scott and Fuller did some separation studies, but that was with dogs aged like 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks, and they found that that type of early separation was really detrimental.

But as far as I know, there's been very few studies done beyond eight weeks, and of course, many people would then say that, okay, well we have to do all that socialization stuff where the animal learns to sort of accept life with humans that would then have to occur at the breeders rather than in the new environment.

But actually I'm not so sure, because it seems that if you have secure attachment, you're better able to self -regulate after being exposed to something that will dysregulate.

So some, you have an event happening, you get anxious and sort of fearful.

And then your nervous system is able to calm down again.

And so I think that if we simply allow dogs to have secure attachment, then perhaps the need for sometimes this socialization procedures are very elaborate, there's like a list of a hundred things that the dog needs to be exposed to, you know, men with beards and children age 12 and people with shoes you know certain types of shoes and you know the vacuum cleaner and so on and so on, there's a whole list of things that you need to expose an animal to and I I would think that if If the animal is securely attached so that they have learned self -regulation, being exposed to those things will not be

such a big deal, but I don't think that we have the research to back up that assertion inquiry yet.

I love this notion, because we can't prepare humans, including ourselves, or animals for every circumstance, but we can train up neural circuits.

I'm a neurobiologist after all.

And so I like to think of this more as, as opposed to preparing for events, you prepare for processes.

So, you know, much has been said on this podcast and others about like deliberate cold exposure, you know, why take a cold shower?

It's not about the specific benefits of the cold shower, it teaches you how to navigate having high adrenaline in your body, which is the universal generic response to stress.

So you can export self -regulation from one situation to the other.

What you're describing is a much more important life stage example than deliberate cold exposure.

It's about, as you said, being able to navigate attachments that are there, then gone, then there again.

This is one of my major concerns.

We don't want to go off on a tangent too far here, but since humans are animals, as you pointed out, about texting, you know, oftentimes texting can be a wonderful tool.

it also can be a way that people don't learn to ever deal with, to self -regulate.

You see this as the plane lands, or the plane's taking off, people are frantically texting, which can be about, hey, my plane just arrived.

It can also be about an inability to just and deal with the real life uncertainty that you're not in charge up there, the pilots and the weather conditions are.

So in any case, I have a probably controversial question, Okay.

But we've opened up some Pandora's boxes.

So why not? I opted to neuter my dog.

I did that when he was about six months old.

I did that honestly reluctantly.

People say, well, you know, men with their dogs, and they don't want to near their dogs.

And it's for these, you know, whatever, Y chromosome related reasons or something, perhaps it is.

but really the reason I was reluctant was A, I thought I might want to breed Costello at some point.

The other is I spent two years of my life studying and researching and eventually publishing papers on the effects of early androgens on, I had a minor role in that study, but effects of early androgens on the brain development.

And you don't have to spend long in that field of hormones and development to know that hormones, testosterone and estrogen, have a powerful, powerful organizing effect on the brain of males and females.

And that also occurs during adolescence.

Right, and then there's the surge of hormone that comes, so right, it happens in utero, and then those are the organizing effects.

And then there are the activating effects as you're pointing out of hormones that then during puberty, the ovaries in females or the testes in males produce hormones that then act on this kind of template that was laid down.

And so I knew that whatever testosterone, estrogen, et cetera, Costello had seen in utero, he'd seen, and that by removing his testicles, let's be honest, what neutering is, all the men are cringing, and the women are like, okay, got it.

But if I said remove ovaries, they might have a different response.

So by removing his testes that he would not experience the activating effects of hormones.

Okay, to make a long story short, it seemed he had a great life.

He was a wonderful dog.

When he got to be about nine years old, he had a lot of joint aching and pain.

He had some extensive nail growth that was really, really fast. Some things were odd.

I opted to do an experiment and I started injecting him with 50 milligrams of testosterone per week.

The response was incredible.

His vigor returned, his joint pain, at least in terms of his willingness to go down the stairs quickly, to stand up quickly.

Incredible. He got two more years of what I thought was a great life.

I hope it was. And what's interesting is that, when I talked about this publicly on a few other podcasts, I injected my bulldog with testosterone after neutering him, I thought I was gonna get a tsunami of criticism from the veterinary community.

Instead, I received hundreds of emails saying, thank you.

We actually actively discourage people from neutering their animals, unless they're in a circumstance where that dog can get out and mate because we don't need more strays.

And there are a number of health, positive health benefits to keeping hormones intact.

And I'm gonna start doing what you did with some of my patient dogs.

Not one vet, mind you, I have no training as a vet, not one vet said, hey, you were out of line doing that.

You shouldn't have been doing that.

And I'll tell you, if I get another dog and it's a male dog, I'll be very careful to not let him out and I'll be very careful with the training so he's not excessively aggressive, but I'm not gonna neuter him.

And I know this is gonna activate some people, but I'd love your thoughts on neutering in male and female dogs in particular, given everything that you and I know about hormones and what we just talked about.

You're touching on several different things that I think are interesting.

One that it's very much a cultural phenomenon that in Norway, I know that you're not allowed to neuter dogs unless for medical reasons.

Really? Yeah. And in Western Australia, you're not allowed not to neuter dogs unless for medical reasons or if you want to breed them.

So it's very cultural whether neutering is something that you do or not in any given location.

that's one the second thing is that you said that neutering is about removing testicles actually there's there's other procedures that can be done which is essentially just snipping the connection so not removing testicles so that they continue producing all the stuff that they produce but they they They can't reproduce sexually.

Yeah, why don't we just give them vasectomies?

Yeah, so vasectomies, and for females the corresponding procedure would then be to sort of...

whatever it is. Tie the tubes.

Yeah, tie the tubes, whatever it is.

And there's also a third option which is chemical castration that's reversible, that you can try to see what behavioral effects you get from a change of hormonal status.

There's also this interesting thing that the knowledge of the effects of castration or of neutering has really changed a lot in the last 20 years or so.

It used to be in the 1990s that it used to be recommended because, you know, they wouldn't reproduce and there'd be less humping and some, so it was sort of promoted with regards to certain behavioural changes.

Later studies have shown, and there's like more than 20 in the last 20 years or so, have shown that quite consistently that some of the effects of neutering might be, particularly in males apparently, and it depends on the age at which this is done also.

And it has to do with the activation process of course.

is that you see an increase in fear, an increase in in reactivity, aggressive behavior, you might see an increase in noise sensitivity, and so on.

So it seems that as you were touching on, the change in hormonal status not only has this physiological, the physical effects on the body, but also behavioral effects.

Now So there's also an increase in risk of certain cancers or certain physical problems and a decrease in others, so I would suggest that once you do get your next dog that you discuss with a veterinarian the best option for that particular breed and that particular individual because it's going to be very breed specific, it's gender specific and it's also the age at which these procedures are done.

Okay, so to me it's very interesting that in Norway, dogs are not allowed to be fixed except for medical reasons.

In Australia, they have to be, at least in Western Australia.

So this idea of keeping dogs intact, so to speak, is not such a heretical one.

But I think in the United States, a lot of this is still getting worked out.

And I think that the statistics say that the number of people with pets in the home now in the United States is like almost every home.

Yeah, I think it's a 40 % of Americans own a dog and I think in Norway, it's like 15.

So and I think probably this ties in a lot to why the cultures have emerged so differently because there's a lot less sort of backyard breeding and so on and feral populations in Scandinavia of dogs.

So we don't have this huge problem with overpopulation that you'll see in some other countries.

So, and I think that here a lot of the neutering is done to control the population predominantly as a way to sort of try to reduce the number of animals that are going to shelters and so on.

Certainly there are a lot of dogs in shelters now.

During the pandemic, people were adopting them like crazy.

So it was actually hard to get dogs and cats during that time.

I don't know what the state of things is now.

Someone can put that in the comments.

I really have one last category of questions, but it's one that you've sort of touched on from various sides throughout today's conversation, and that relates to humans as animals.

You know, I don't think one can be an animal ethologist or a neuro -biologist for that matter who, you know, reads papers and does studies and on other animals, without at some point stepping back and making this realization, like we're old world primates.

We're the best at technology development, you know, among all the species.

I mean, I don't think that's too much of a leap.

We're certainly not as good at natural camouflage, catching and killing things with our hands.

we need tools to do this.

So we have our strengths, we have our limitations with respect to the other species.

Is there anything in your training as an animal ethologist that, you know, causes you to reflect on human beings as, you know, particularly, I don't know, spectacular and particularly deficient in some way like or any just any kind of musings about the human species, because that's a species we haven't talked about today.

But I think a lot of what you're describing in terms of the breakdown of these sequence of behaviors, what makes us feel safe.

One can't help but wonder like, what are some aspects of ourselves that perhaps if we thought about a little bit more deeply, we could really benefit from?

One thing that leaps to mind is the extent to which cultural learning occurs in humans.

For other animal species, they learn from trial and error, if I do this that happens.

First that happens, then that other thing happens.

classical conditioning and operant conditioning tie into sort of forming the animal's behaviour.

They also have social learning, they watch someone else and look at what they do.

In this situation I'm feeling a bit disconcerted watching you to see how you react.

Oh, you don't seem to be that upset.

Okay, I guess I don't have to be that either, or you're interacting with that thing in that way, I guess I'll do the same.

But it's like, the influence is from the animals that are closest to you and from your own personal experience.

And we sort of stand on the shoulders of giants, we humans, because we can read people's thoughts that are thousands of years old, literally.

And so I think that's one of the biggest differences, I think, in our learning is that we used to be called man the tool maker, as if tool making would be the thing that set us apart from other animals, until Jane Goodall reported that she'd seen chimpanzees making tools, that termite fishing behavior that she saw where they would break off a twig and take the leaves off and then sharpen it, so that they could insert it into a termite mound.

The termites would climb onto it and they could carefully extract it and eat the termites.

So they made these tools.

So yeah, that would be, I guess, my first spontaneous reflection to your question.

That's a great one, frankly, this idea that, in addition to our ability to build sophisticated tools that our ability to stamp down knowledge and I mean knowledge is always shifting so some of the things that we've been discussing today and that I've seen said with great conviction might be proven completely false you know a year from now so that's that's I think the the interesting thing about science is that we're always having to question our assumptions.

Alright I appreciate you reminding us of that that this is all a dynamic process you know we can only do so much with this piece of meat in our skulls in terms of trying to decipher the world around us.

But I do think that this idea of, this insight that we're unique in our ability to learn from things long ago, stamp down things now that people could potentially learn from not just in the present but in the future is incredible and in many ways appropriate for where we're at now, which is you sitting here educating us about the different species and I want to, I really want to extend my gratitude for the work that you do is very unique.

People by now will realize that you're animal ethologist but you pay attention to real world experiments run in a diverse range of settings.

And it's clear that you have great care for all the species on the planet and how they interact.

You've also offered us some wonderful tools of how to improve the lives of our cats, our dogs, and to really hopefully make people somewhat of ethologists of themselves and of their interactions with animals.

I think that's, for me, one of the biggest takeaways today is to, really, people listening to this and watching this should really reflect.

Not just on does the dog like to be pet here or there, but, you know, how is it that a certain behavior is showing up in an animal?

What is that reflective because of its natural lineage and our own and to really think about those relationships and trying to improve them.

So you've given us tremendous knowledge for its own sake, practical knowledge.

And again, there's just so much care woven into everything you do and that you've shared.

So thank you for traveling such a long way to share with us.

Thank you for having me.

It's been a great discussion I think.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Carolina Westland.

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to us.

[Optimizing Pet Health and Behavior: Insights from Ethology]-[What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund]

📋 Summary

Enhancing Pet Wellbeing Through Ethological Understanding

Understanding the Predatory Sequence

The Core Affect Space and Emotional Needs

Reframing Dominance and Social Roles

Understanding Cats and Other Species

Conclusion: The Importance of Secure Attachment

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript