Do Dogs Really Love Us? with Oprah and Dr. Carl Safina

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to the Oprah Podcast.

I'm so glad you're spending your time here with us.

I'm really, really excited for this episode because we're exploring an idea that I've wondered about.

Maybe you have to, but I've wondered about this for years.

Do our dogs share the same love for us as we have for them?

Do dogs and other animals experience joy, grief, loneliness, even hope?

Over the years, I've had 21 dogs, each one a unique member of my family who gave us so much love and so many memories.

My guest says that dogs help make us the people we would like to be.

Isn't that the truth?

Carl Safina is a world-renowned ecologist and conservationist who writes extensively, and may I say exquisitely too,

about the interior lives of animals, including his New York Times bestseller, Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel, which is just an absolutely fascinating read.

Highly recommended.

And your newest book, What Owls Know and What Humans Believe.

Okay, can I tell you, welcome, first of all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for being here.

Fantastic to be here.

Well, when I read, after reading this book, I had the most interesting dream about

my former

cocker spaniels that I had.

for 13 and 14 years in the 90s, Sophie and Solomon, that I took to work every day with me

during the Oprah show.

And no matter where I was, they were either in a green room waiting, if it was Oscars, they were waiting backstage.

Anyway, they passed away years ago.

And I hadn't had a dream about them.

And after reading this book, and

I had a dream that something had happened to Sophie had been injured.

She was the black cocker, and Solomon was my brown cocker.

Sophie, they were together.

Sophie had been injured.

In the dream.

In the dream.

And I could see that that she was injured and I came up to Solomon and I said, tell me what happened.

And

he transmitted what had happened to me.

And in the dream, because I have lucid dreams, in the dreams, I said, oh, I'm dreaming this because I just read about elephants communicating.

Dr.

Carl Safina is a renowned conservationist and passionate defender of animals in the natural world.

Do they have their own consciousness?

His work work has earned many honors, including a MacArthur Genius Prize.

Carl's beautiful writing encourages us to better understand our relationship to animals and our shared planet.

If we're so powerful, why aren't we taking care of the miracle of the world that made us and maintains us?

Our conversation about dogs included some truly heroic stories of dogs coming to their owner's rescue.

I still get chills thinking about it.

My house was filled with black smoke.

Carl Carl also delves deeper into the relational bond that connects all living creatures.

That is powerful.

That is powerful.

You know, one of the things I loved when I was reading Beyond Words is that it's very clear that you recognize, not only recognize, but say that you believe that animals are different, but not less than us.

What do we need to unlearn about our relationship to animals?

Yes.

Well,

in a way, that is the exploration I went through when we raised this baby owl.

And in this book.

Which brings us to Alfie and me.

Me.

Yes.

Right.

And so I've been with animals my whole life.

I've had them, cared for them, trained them, been with them.

And we raised this little wild owl, and I was so surprised at her relational capacity.

She would sometimes come over and want to be stroked and lean into it like just like our dogs do.

And I was saying,

of all people, why am I surprised?

Why don't I know?

I think I'm tuned in, but why don't I know?

that these creatures have these capacities for relationality, which they have.

They have that with their own families in their own lives.

You knew that because you had written beyond words.

Well, I thought so.

I thought so.

But this was

the proximity, the closeness,

the mutual seeking of the pleasure of physical contact with me and a baby owl that we raised.

Yeah, I saw that moment where you first touched her and she goes, Yeah, it's unbelievable.

Yes, yes, yes.

Oh, it's nice, bro.

Oh, yeah.

So I thought, well, why did we alienate ourselves from the whole rest of this living planet?

And I thought, well, are we just not intelligent enough beings, or are we taught our disconnection?

We're taught that we have dominion over the animals, and therefore we think that that's a huge part of it.

Well, therefore, we think that we're not sure that we're more powerful and we're better.

Yes, definitely.

We're better.

There is more value to us than there is to the rest of the world.

The whole rest of the world is here to serve us, to yield us together.

Instead of we are all a part of the animal.

We are in a huge network of relationships on a miraculous planet.

So why don't we know that?

So I said, well, some cultures do, though.

Right.

Some cultures do.

Right.

And that's what I explored through this book.

What do other cultures teach about our relationship with the world?

And it turns out that all indigenous cultures teach that we're all one family.

All the South Asian religions, all the dharmic religions teach that the soul goes equivalently through different lifetimes in the reincarnation process and in the process of karma, right?

The Eastern religions teach that the world is run by these balances of necessary opposites.

What might look like opposites, they're necessary to balance.

And the human role is not to disturb the balances.

So every other realm of human thought over thousands of years were that all life is family.

The world is a set of balances.

We should maintain the balances and respect basically the holiness of this sacred world.

But the West is a total outlier because in the West, we came up with this idea that the whole world is here to serve us and we're better than everything.

And that is the root of our disconnection.

We are taught that.

It's not a natural thing,

it's just a different way of looking at things.

And

it deprives us because we've written the miracle out of our script.

But what has Alfie taught you?

Well, really, she has taught me that all these other creatures that are out in the wild, that they really have wild lives, that she knows.

Like, for instance, she knew our dogs.

But if a friend came with a strange dog, that dog would freak her out.

She'd react like, oh, that's a potential predator.

I'm afraid of it.

I'm going to get away.

But our dogs, she'd just go and sit next to them.

So she knows who she is by

where she is and who she's with.

And how do we know who we are?

By who we're with and where we are.

Yes.

It's the same thing.

Wow, that's fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating.

And it makes my feeling of, you know, I used to think animals are really cool.

I used to think animals are really beautiful.

I used to think nature is really peaceful.

But more and more, I really feel like it's an absolute miracle is what it totally is.

Life is a miracle.

The definition of miracle is it's something that breaks the laws of physics.

You know, like in literature and movies, where you have a miracle, it's where something happens that really can't happen, right?

Right.

And energetically,

the laws of physics, second law of thermodynamics says everything tends toward disorder.

You put a drop of ink in a bowl of water, it will spread out, the water will turn gray.

It will never become a drop of ink, ever, ever, ever, right?

But you take an egg that's laid, you know what an egg looks like on the inside, we've cracked enough of them open, and it makes itself a bird.

That violates the laws of physics.

It's a negative entropy that maintains itself in a state far from equilibrium.

The entire universe is going toward equilibrium.

Living things maintain themselves in a state far from equilibrium and that's not supposed to happen.

But that's what life is.

We ask you, our podcast listeners, to send us pictures of your precious dogs who I know are really your family members.

I know.

I'd like to read a passage from Carl Safina's remarkable book, Beyond Words.

So, do other animals have human emotions?

Yes, they do.

Do humans have animal emotions?

Yes, they're largely the same.

Fear, aggression, well-being, anxiety, and pleasure are the emotions of shared brain structures and shared chemistries originated in shared ancestry.

They are the shared feelings of a shared world.

So this from page 34 Beyond Words.

Do other animals have, you say, human emotions?

Yes, they do.

They do?

They have, well,

do other animals have emotions?

They have emotions.

And humans have animal emotions because humans are animals.

So there's a lot of analogous things.

Yes.

And there are a lot of things that I think are very much the same.

Not all the same.

Like, you know, I mean, even among people,

people's emotions differ.

Emotionality differs.

And I think that's the same among species.

It differs.

But they have the same kinds of emotions that we have because they have the same nervous system that we have, the same neurotransmitters, the same hormones, exactly the same molecules.

Those chemicals are the same.

And so if a dog seems happy, they're happy.

And they do smile, don't they smile?

And they do smile.

Oh, my goodness.

I was running with Sadie the other day.

She was smiling.

Yes, definitely.

Yes.

Yeah.

And do they have their own consciousness?

Well, what do you mean by consciousness?

The way I think of it is when we have total anesthesia, we're unconscious.

That means we're not connected to our senses.

So they have that kind of consciousness.

They see with their eyes, they hear with their ears, they smell with their noses, they play and have fun.

They're afraid of danger.

They're fierce in defense of their territory or their people if they're dogs in our family.

And all of that stuff is very relatable because it's basically the same thing.

Thank you all for joining the Oprah podcast.

We need to take a quick break.

When we come back, we're going to hear from a neuroscientist who trained dogs to stay still inside an MRI machine to answer this question.

Do our dogs really love us?

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Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast.

I am here with Dr.

Carl Safina, the author of numerous books about our relationship to dogs, other animals, and the natural world.

So, I know you're a fellow dog lover.

Do you

believe or know that our dogs love us?

Do they love us or are they just looking for a treat?

That's another thing, like consciousness, is that we use the word so differently.

We say, Oh, I love my mother, I love my children, I love ice cream, I love shopping.

Right, right, use it for everything.

It's the same word.

But if you think of what love feels to us when we love someone, we feel that we want to be close to them right and so

just for instance in our house our dogs are never given any kind of a treat or fed or anything like that upstairs in the bedroom but at night they come upstairs why because they want to be near us when i'm in my riding cottage our dogs frequently leave the house come up the little path to the writing cottage They hang out.

Why?

Because they want to be near me.

I want to be near them too, because I love them.

That's what love feels like.

And yeah, that's love.

And that's how you know it's not just looking for a treat.

Yes.

Exactly.

Yes.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So you say that our pets show us how to be better than we are.

What does that mean?

Well, I think, you know, because people are very complex and people are sometimes a little duplicitous and people are not always honest with themselves or each other.

But our dogs are,

what you see is what you get.

They are loyal.

They are forgiving.

They always want to get past it and get beyond it.

They always want to make up.

They are very fierce when they feel that we are being threatened.

And, you know, if we could just be straight shooters, loyal, always want to get past our troubles.

defend what we love and defend our people in our place, I think that we would be a little better for it.

And the dogs in that way show us a way to do that.

Well, you not only, you know, I know you have dogs, you recently lost your dog, Jude.

We did lose one, yes, Jude, yes.

And how old was Jude?

He was 14.

Yeah, 14 is about the age for big dogs.

Yeah.

I lost a lot of dogs at 14.

He faded very peacefully over about a day and a half.

I think we were in a way lucky.

He went so peacefully.

He just drained away and he was just lying in his bed.

You could feel the life force leaving.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Yeah, but he didn't seem in pain or uncomfortable or even really particularly unhappy, actually.

Yes, because dogs are just...

What I've learned about being in the present moment is that dogs are always just in the present moment.

That's another thing that they show us, yes, right.

Just like be there with all four feet in the air.

And they're not worried about what they did or did they knock over the water bowl or what they did.

They're certainly not worried about whether they're going to get into graduate school or get the promotion or the next job or what their sister-in-law said to them or anything like that.

Did you grow up loving animals?

Is that how you came to write about animals?

I did absolutely grow up loving animals, but the funny thing is, I actually,

up until 15 years ago, I would have said, I don't really like dogs.

Isn't that weird?

That is very weird.

And the reason is

when I was, I liked dogs that I had.

I love dogs that I had.

But in general, the reason is that a lot of the interactions with people and their dogs that you see

is not very pleasant.

It's not very pleasant to be around.

And because dogs have such complicated minds and emotional systems, they can be traumatized.

They can be hurt.

They can be very uncomfortable around a particular person that doesn't understand them well or treats them badly, right?

And you kind of see all of that.

Because once they're treated badly, they live in fear of that person.

Sure, of her, yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

they can live in fear and and they can be traumatized you know and when i see people a dog is trying to sniff on a walk and they're just yanking on the chain or they're yelling at them or they're holding them tight on the leash it's just unpleasant and uh somebody who a friend a friend of ours said well you know one thing i love about you is you always let your dogs be dogs And I never thought of it that way before, but that's become sort of like my guiding principle is to let them be dogs.

And how do you do that?

I let them show us what they kind of would like to do.

We provide guide rails that if they like you a lot, the guide rails just have to be very gentle.

Often I whisper my commands because if you whisper, they have to make sure that they're hearing you instead of yelling at them all the time.

If you have a little puppy and you want it to follow you, you walk away from it instead of you know, dragging it around on a leash.

You take it off the leash and you walk away.

And it's like, oh, wait, I'm here alone.

No, I don't want to be here alone.

So, I mean, it's easy.

It's actually easy because

their

evolved social behavior is more like people than probably any other animal.

So you said up until about 15 years ago.

So 15 years ago, what happened?

So 15 years ago, what happened was,

so this is a slightly complicated story, okay?

Okay.

So I thought, well, one thing about dogs is they're kind of designed animals.

And I'm really interested in nature, and I'm really interested in evolution, what life really is, and how it really works, right?

And dogs are sort of designed.

Like you want a little lap dog, you make one.

You want a hunting dog, you make one.

You want a guard dog, you make one.

All these different breeds.

You want something that's going to go swim in the water and retrieve things, you make one.

So I thought you can't really learn much about nature and real life, what it really is from dogs.

Then two things happened.

Because our culture has domesticized dogs.

Domesticized and just made them what we want them to be.

Like we make everything, like we make chairs the way we want chairs and cars the way we want cars.

I figure we made these animals the way we want them.

Yeah.

So then what happened was kind of odd.

First of all,

we had a baby raccoon whose mother had gotten hit by a car.

They had a den in a tree in our yard.

This emaciated baby raccoon fell out of the tree.

And we were raising this baby raccoon.

And they're very, very playful.

They're bad pets.

I don't recommend it.

You need to know a lot about animal behavior to be safe around raccoons.

So I don't recommend it, but they're fantastic animals.

And as soon as this little thing got healthy and got to the point where it was very playful, it started to do the exact same play bow that dogs do.

Front paws down, rear end up in the air, inviting you to play.

And I thought, whoa, that's not even a canid.

That's the same behavior dogs do.

That means that these dogs have a lot of really ancient stuff still in them.

Oh, I better pay a lot more attention to dogs.

The same

thing that position is a, what do you call that position?

When the positive?

The playbow.

It's so ancient that it predates even the Canid lineage.

Okay, then the Canid lineage, so there are carnivores, raccoons are one among many.

And then there are canids, like foxes and coyotes and wolves, and then there are dogs.

Dogs' only ancestors are wolves, right?

Right.

Okay.

So this playbow predates all of that.

It's this ancient thing.

And I realized, whoa, these dogs,

there's a lot of really genuine, authentic stuff still in there.

I better pay a lot more attention.

I have been.

Yes.

Because I pay a lot of attention to wild animals.

But I was paying a sudden attack.

Yeah, okay.

You thought they were too domesticated for you to pay any attention to.

So then I went to Yellowstone because I was going to write about wolves.

and i see wolves and what i realize is that wolves live in nuclear families what we call a pack it's mom and dad wolf and their young ones of maybe the last two or three years after that when they get to be adolescents late adolescents young adults they leave to go find their footing in the world just like our children are supposed to do right or like we did so

The young wolves look to the mom and dad wolves.

What are are we doing next?

What are we doing now?

Are we sleeping for the next six hours?

Are we going to go hunting?

Are we going to move over the ridge to the next valley?

Mom and dad, tell us what we're going to do now.

The young wolves are always looking to their parents and they play, they wag their tails, they do with each other so many things that dogs do in our homes and in our families.

And so what I realize is that what dogs are, really, they're wolves in arrested development.

They never quite

become full adults to the stage where they say, I have to leave.

I have to go find my own place in the world.

Yes, because they're dependent upon us for food.

So they stay dependent on us.

Yes.

Whereas if you raise other wild animals, really wild animals, like that raccoon, for instance.

Or if you took in a wild wolf.

Or if you took in a wild wolf, or if you raise wild cats,

they get to adolescence.

Before adolescence, they're playful, they're friendly, they never hurt you.

At adolescence, they get a little cranky and they leave because they are geared to go find their own life.

And the dogs never do that.

They are wolves in arrested development.

That's my conclusion from watching all this stuff and thinking about it a lot for a lot of years.

Well, once you decided that they were wolves in arrested development, is that when you decided to get your own?

Oh, no.

I had had a couple of dogs that I loved.

And then right around that time,

a dog that we had had for a while passed away.

And we wound up getting, make a long story short, we wound up getting three dogs.

I was like, okay, we can get another dog.

And Patricia, my wife, said, okay, well, you can just say you can get another dog.

I want two dogs.

Okay, so we got two dogs.

And then my very beloved former editor had a little puppy, a miniature Australian shepherd that had the energy of a nuclear reactor.

Let me say Australian shepherds.

And they lived in a penthouse in in Manhattan, and the dog was going literally out of her mind.

So one of the visits there, my editor's wife said to me, Carl, do you want our dog?

This dog is not doing well here with us.

And at first I said, well, I don't know.

I have to ask Patricia.

So I called her on the train as I was going home.

She said, why don't you just bring the dog?

So now we have that dog.

That's Katie.

She's fantastic.

Well, I want to bring in Dr.

Gregory Burns.

He's a neuroscientist who spent a decade studying the brains of dogs using groundbreaking MRI research.

Welcome, Dr.

Burns.

Hello.

Hey, hi.

Great to be here.

You wrote a New York Times bestseller called How Dogs Love Us.

Tell us how you were able to prove that our dogs love us.

Well, I'm a neuroscientist, and so I view behavior and everything through the lens of the brain.

And so about 11 years ago, I started a project where we trained dogs to go in MRI scanners, awake, unrestrained, and just, you you know, just a thing that they did.

I read that, so can I stop you?

Because everybody's thinking the same thing I was thinking when I first read it.

How do you get a dog to

be in an MRI machine?

It was originally a project.

I didn't know if it could be done.

In fact, everyone I told thought this was a ridiculous idea.

Yeah.

But I teamed up with a very good dog trainer, and we basically broke down the whole process of going into an MRI for a dog's perspective.

And I built a simulator that I kept in my basement, a big tube.

And just over the course of many months, I slowly acclimated my dog Callie to going in this tube.

And then I taught her how to put her head like in a little chin rest.

And we made little earplugs because, of course, they're very loud.

And I started playing recordings of the sound an MRI makes just in the background when we're playing and having fun and just put all these steps together just very slowly and very gradually and in essence just made a game out of it for her because she doesn't know what an MRI is.

Right.

So what did you find out through this process?

So of course everyone wants to know if their dog loves them.

That was what I wanted to know as well.

Is it just the treats?

Is it some kind of bond that they have beyond that?

Or is it dependency?

Is it like, you know, you can't get along without me, so you have to be nice to me?

It could be.

Yeah, it could be any of those things because they can't speak to us and tell us what they're thinking.

So my idea was just, well, let's go look in their brains because we know essentially what their brain looks like.

They have many of the same basic structures that we do.

And so we focused on the reward parts of their brain and asked a very simple question.

When we show a dog a treat or the prospect of a treat, we're going to see activity there.

That's what Pavlov discovered 100 years ago.

But then the question is, well, what about when there's no treat?

What about when just person is there, when their owner is there and they just say, good girl or good boy?

What does that do?

And what we found was for the majority of dogs, about three quarters of the dogs, it was equal response to both of those things.

The dogs valued that praise and just being around their person as much as food.

And for about a quarter of them, they actually valued it more, the praise.

Wow.

And so what has doing all this work taught you about the significance of our dogs in our lives?

Well, I agree with Dr.

Safina that they

evolved to be with us.

They are our first friends.

They are the first animals who, in essence, chose to be with us.

And so they are very well suited to our lifestyles.

They are probably the most successful animal on this planet, besides humans, because there's roughly one dog for every 10 people on this planet.

That's a lot of dogs.

And that speaks to their success in kind of hitching their wagons to us.

Yeah, what do you want to say, Doug?

Another huge, interesting thing about that is that everywhere people have ever gone, dogs have been there with them.

So we seem to have valued their presence in our lives as much as they value our presence in theirs.

They seem to be these companions that we don't want to go across the ocean in outrigger canoes without dogs.

We don't want to travel to Australia 60,000 years ago without dogs.

I mean, it's really unbelievable.

The Arctic dogs are everywhere people have gone.

That's fascinating.

And are they are dogs capable of other complex human emotions have you discovered, like jealousy or empathy or guilt?

So we have done many experiments in those realms.

And probably I think the one that kind of stands out the most is we have actually studied jealousy.

So we did an experiment with the dogs that were trained for MRI, and we had their human standing there right in front of them.

And so we did a test where the human sometimes gave their dog a treat, and then other times they turned around and put the food in a bucket behind them.

And then the third condition was they gave the treat to a very realistic looking statue of a dog.

So we assume that our subjects were not terribly happy when they didn't get their treat.

But what was interesting is what's the difference between when that treat goes to a bucket versus another dog or something that looks like a dog.

So we thought that that might evoke some jealousy.

And what was interesting is that for some of the dogs, it actually evoked a response in an area of the brain called the amygdala, which is associated with arousal.

It's like getting the hackles up.

And they were clearly bothered by it, even though to outward appearances, they were doing what they were taught.

They stayed in the scanner.

They were just watching.

But we could see something in the brain that that did bother them.

But I think the important thing here is not all the dogs were like that, only some of them.

And when we looked at it more closely, these were the dogs who had histories of aggressive behavior.

They would fight with other dogs, especially over resources.

My dog being one of them.

Callie, even though she was the first one to do this,

I say she was the first, but not the best.

And now your latest book is called Cow Puppy.

I love that title, Cow Puppy, about your herd of 10 miniature cows.

So what do you want us to know about cows?

Are they in any way like dogs?

They're a lot like dogs.

So four years ago, I left the city and my wife and I moved to a farm to live the Green Acres life

and found myself trying to manage pastures and acquired a bull and two cows who very quickly gave birth.

And that three turned into five, which then turned into ten.

And I fell in love with them.

I found that they are as demonstrative as the dogs that I have, if you know how to interpret their language.

They're extremely social.

And following on what...

The cows are or the calves are?

Because I have a bunch of cows and I don't think of cows as being very similar to dogs.

I asked that question, but I don't think of them as being very similar at all.

I have seen very similar behaviors that my cows have like the dogs.

So they have play bows too, especially the calves.

They will kind of go down and put their front legs down and put their butt up in the air when they want to play, and they even even wag their tails.

And

they're extremely affectionate with each other.

And once they accept you into the herd, they treat you the same way.

They lick me,

they'll lie down and just cuddle up to me.

And there's no treats involved because all I do is manage the pastures.

Wow.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

And I think if

you give almost anything a chance to show you how relational they are capable of being,

you will be astonished, as I have been astonished,

at

the world that we are surrounded by, with all these things that we think are just scenery, oh, a bird flitting by, a rabbit in the bushes.

These creatures actually have lives.

They have their own relationships.

They're capable of showing you that, but we are almost never in a situation where we can see it it or we're even open

to seeing it.

And the big exception is our dogs or maybe our cats in our homes.

And most people don't get

contact with any of these other lives and any of their minds, their emotional systems, which have a lot more in common than they differ.

Thank you, Dr.

Burns.

So fascinating.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

Thanks to all of my fellow dog lovers.

Thank y'all for listening to this special episode of the Oprah Podcast.

When we come back, we're going to meet families whose dogs literally saved their owners' lives.

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Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast.

I am grateful to you for taking time out of your busy day to be here.

You may think your dog is only interested in treats and an app.

You're about to hear two stories of dogs coming to the rescue just in the nick of time.

Really incredible.

Do you ever look into your dog's eyes and wonder, what's going on in there?

That's exactly what my guest, Carl Safina, is inviting us to do, to open our minds to the phenomenal capabilities and capacities of the animal mind.

We heard from one of our listeners, Gabby, a mother of two in Pennsylvania.

She was a part of a group that rescued 35 dogs left homeless after Hurricane Helene struck the East Coast in 2024.

Gabby adopted one of those dogs, a shy boy named Rusty, who less than two weeks after joining the family, showed Gabby what Carl sees as a dog's true nature.

Watchful, fiercely protective, intuitive.

Hi, yes, first of all, I am so nervous and awestruck.

Thank you for having me.

I grew up watching you with my mom in the afternoons.

So, you know, fast forward 11-ish days later, Rusty's come home.

He's starting to acclimate.

We definitely were mindful of giving him that space.

And Rusty was in the room with us.

And I just, I don't know how long I had been asleep, but I just remember waking up because he was barking.

And this dog had not made a noise the whole time we had had him so far.

And Wesley at the time was six months old.

And Michael was 21 months old.

And so I got up and I was like, you know what, Rusty?

Like, stop.

But then he started gnawing at my sleeve on my sweatshirt that I was wearing.

So

I opened my door.

I still get chills kind of thinking about it, but my house was filled with black smoke.

And,

you know, at the time, I just I didn't know what was going to happen.

I just remember kind of like going into the things that I did know because my husband is a firefighter and has been a volunteer firefighter for 20 plus years.

So I knew I needed to stay low.

I knew I needed to grab my boys and also get the dogs out.

So Rusty and my other dog, Arya, that was in the bedroom came down the steps with me.

I couldn't see anything because it was just such a thick layer of smoke in the house.

But I got them outside.

I got them with the boys.

I put them safely in their car seats in my car that happened to be parked up front.

But then I realized that my other dogs were still inside.

And so I know that they, I know what they say, and my husband scolded me for it, I promise, but to not go back in.

But I went back in because I was not going to leave my dogs behind

because they're my family.

And so I went back in, you know, in the thick of the smoke, my Dalmatian, who you would think would be the most equipped to handle a situation like this, proceeded to roll over and fall back to sleep as I'm trying to drag her out of the house.

In that process, I located the fire.

There was a fire extinguisher in our kitchen, and I was able to put it out very quickly.

And evidently, what had happened was an electrical outlet burst, and that spark caught a cereal box, which then caught on fire, which then fell into a pot.

Or at least that's what we've surmised from

the investigations afterwards.

Where were your smoke detectors?

What happened with the smoke detectors?

That's a good question, right?

So we test our smoke detectors, daylight savings twice a year.

We do all of those things

because we're very fire prevention minded, just naturally, and they failed.

They didn't go off.

Wow.

Yikes.

But Rusty, it sends the smoke in the house and that there was something going on and was trying to get you out.

Yes.

Yes.

And I mean, we were new to him.

He was new to us.

But the fact that he was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that we got out of that house, I mean, it means absolutely everything to us.

And, you know, quite frankly, if Rusty hadn't have been there, because evidently my other dogs could have cared less.

I'm not sure where we would be right now, which is hard to think about because the six-month-old baby and a 21-month-old, I mean my own life put aside like I just I can't imagine what that would have looked like so we're very grateful to him it's interesting that you say cared less I don't know if it's cared less or that that dog had a sensitivity that the other dogs did not what do you say well apparently that's the case but I think you know Rusty was probably wondering I'm alerting you to something really serious and dangerous you won't believe me a lot of times when dogs are trying to alert people we don't give them the credit of saying oh, what's wrong?

Let me get up and check it out, right?

We try to dismiss it because we don't give them the credit that they deserve, even though we love them, they're part of our family, but our expectations of them don't really match their capabilities.

That's right, because you're so readily willing to dismiss them when they're obviously trying to show you something or speak to you in a way that communicates danger or communicates alarm.

Yes.

Gabby, thank you so much for sharing that story.

Thank you so much.

And Rusty, we couldn't see you, but thank you, Rusty.

Amanda and her son Gabriel are joining us on Zoom.

Amanda, tell us what happened with your dog, Axel.

Yes.

So

thank you for having us.

It's an honor to be here.

And so my son, Gabriel,

he had a stroke at 17.

and

going into his senior year of high school.

And on

Saturday morning, Axel, our dog, woke me up at around five in the morning.

And he wasn't very gentle about it.

You know, he went on top of the bed in our room, both paws on my chest, really intense on waking me up.

I figured, you know, the dog wanted to be let out.

So my husband went downstairs.

My son's room was downstairs.

And my husband walked to the back to open the sliding door.

and let Axel out and he didn't follow.

He stopped in front of my son's door.

Little Little did we know, my son was already actively having a stroke, had fallen before that.

Well, we were upstairs sleeping.

I don't know if Axel saw it, if he was present or not, but he knew to somehow, he knew to go upstairs, wake us up, bring us downstairs to encounter Gabriel and stopped in front of Gabriel's room.

And Gabriel came out.

He was swearing.

He was already, you know, actively in this stroke.

And being a teenage boy, you know, we would never have gone into his room until possibly noon 1 p.m i mean he because he needs to sleep yes yes exactly and so you know it was um later we we found out from from doctors how

significant and important it was that axel shooed us to go see gabriel because had it been five hours before we got him to the hospital, he could have been paralyzed forever or worse.

Gabriel, what do you want to say?

I don't know where I would have been if it wasn't like as fast as it was, but

like hearing that if it wasn't as fast as it was, that I would have not even recovered as well as I have is just, it was terrifying.

Yeah.

And I was wondering, how do you not give Axel every treat that

How do you not succumb to everything?

Because like, Axel, you saved my life, so you can have anything you want now now on.

Yeah,

yeah, well, he's actually right here nice to me.

Um, he's kind of laying down, yeah, I don't know, yeah, but yeah,

there you go.

Oh, wow, wow, that's a beautiful dog, beautiful dog.

What kind of dog?

Um, he's a border collie collie mix, so uh-huh, border collies are so smart, anyway.

They are so smart, but look at the love in just right there.

You can just look at that.

I mean, what do you make?

What do you make of this?

Well, look, I mean, here, here are here

is just

these two

we think of them as different species right people and dogs and and yet the pleasure of that touch is so mutual

and dogs understand when things are normal and when things are out of the ordinary and they understand distress they show that all the time so that makes sense to you that Axel would have sensed something was off with Gabriel and would have

awakened that.

But the strange thing is, I mean, was your door closed?

Was your your door closed in the room?

The door was closed.

Okay.

Yeah, I went to my room and I closed the door, just go to sleep, because that's just normal.

And that's whenever

my dad came down with Axel and that's whenever Axel just like he stopped at my door and he just wouldn't wouldn't leave.

Yeah.

So, Oprah, so there's another thing in there

that is a thing called object permanence.

And psychologists forever said only humans have object permanence.

The idea that when you don't see something, it still exists.

Well, obviously, these dogs know who they are.

They know who we are.

They know where they are.

They understand their lives.

They understand who is in their lives.

We are in their lives.

So

this dog saw their person in trouble, have a fall.

He goes, he closes the door.

The dog still knows he's in there in trouble and goes to get help.

Wow.

We've heard this a lot, though.

Are dogs able to sense strokes more so than

I don't know?

Well, there are some illnesses, you know, there are dogs that are trained to alert about seizures and things like that.

And apparently, there are even chemical cues that the body gives off that dogs can smell about oncoming seizures.

It's different than this, right?

But

other kinds of cues, because

they're like superheroes.

Their smell is way better than ours.

Their hearing is way better than ours.

So in a way, their world is a lot more vivid to them than our world is to us.

Thanks, Gabriel.

Thanks, Amanda.

Thank you.

And good dog, Axel.

Yeah, good dog.

Good dog.

Thanks for sharing that.

Thank you.

We have one more person joining us on Zoom.

Joining us from Maryland, Christina, who started an online community call, Black Women Love Dogs with over 35,000 followers on Instagram.

Tell us the story behind that.

Yes.

Hello, Oprah.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about my community.

Like you said, I'm originally from Maryland.

I grew up here with a single mother, and I would ask my mom for a dog consistently.

I didn't realize, of course, the reason that she kept saying no was because she just couldn't afford it.

She had to take care of me.

So after I graduated from my HBCU, I said, you know what?

I'm going to go ahead and do my lifelong dream of having a dog and being a dog mom.

And so I actually adopted my dog, my first baby, Conna.

And after I adopted her, I started looking for a community.

I wanted to be able to speak to people about

everything dealing with dog ownership.

I noticed that a lot of the communities, there weren't a lot of people that looked like me.

I was like, you know what?

I just want to see if I can build my own community.

My mom always taught me, if there isn't something there for you, create it.

Why don't you do it?

And it just so happened to grow into such a beautiful community.

Now we do so many different in-person events where we're able to meet up with so many different black dog moms.

We're able to do giveaways.

Last year, we just awarded our first scholarship to a future black veterinarian.

What do you want to say about your special bond with your dog?

How has it changed you?

For sure.

So recently I actually just moved to Houston, Texas, and me and my dog are the only ones there.

I don't have any family or friends, and it can be really isolating to be alone.

And so one of the things that happened when I was in a position where I was just in a somber mood one day, she just came to me and she literally just rested her paw on my shoulder.

And I just, we just looked at each other and I just started bawling with tears because I just felt like she just knew in that moment what I needed was her comfort and her support.

She's always there to make sure that I feel at peace.

I always tell people that no matter what, if Khan is there, I'm good.

I'm going to be at peace.

I can do anything.

I love that handle too.

Black women love dogs.

Thank you so much, Christina.

Good luck with it.

Thank you so much.

Good luck.

Good luck with it.

Thank you all for listening.

We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Carl Safina.

I found it so fascinating.

Hope you do too.

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Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast.

If you're enjoying this conversation as much as I am, I would encourage you to pick up any one of Carl Safina's beautifully written books on our relationship to animals and the natural world.

Now back to our conversation.

So this is what I wanted to know.

How did you get interested in you?

We started the conversation about as a young boy, you were interested in nature, you were paying attention, you saw,

there was a deep awareness for you.

Yeah.

And actually that started really with animals that were not wild animals.

My father bred canaries as a hobby.

Yeah.

And as a seven-year-old, I demanded that I had to have my own flock of homing pigeons.

And so

my father very generously complied with my request.

And I had my own flock of homing pigeons from the time I was seven, eight, nine, ten.

When you're a little boy like that,

you have plenty of time.

to be with these kinds of creatures.

I'd go in the coop, I'd watch their lives, I'd watch them in the stack of fruit boxes that we had where they would build their nests.

And I'd watch them decide who they were going to marry.

And sometimes they had squabbles and jealousy.

We'd let them out every day.

They'd fly around.

They'd come back, feed their babies, and go to sleep.

Across the yard, we lived in our own stack of boxes in our apartment building where people figured out who they were going to marry.

They sometimes had their squabbles.

The adults left during the day.

They came home, fed their babies, and went to sleep.

And I realized right from the start, before I was taught, oh no, I realized that their lives are really in broad strokes.

We're all the same.

We're all one life.

You were able to connect that at a young age.

That's the natural thing to see.

And that's really why all indigenous people, despite the tremendous cultural differences, their sense of our relationship among other living things is that we are all family.

That idea

only got into Western culture with Charles Darwin, and you know, and a lot of people still don't accept that, right?

Yeah, yeah, that we are all family.

That is powerful.

That is powerful.

Don't you say that I can't remember the number of how the percentage of birds left on the planet are all chickens now.

Yeah,

something

like 80% of all the birds in the world

are chickens

and a few ducks and a few turkeys that we raise.

Right.

And we raise them to pen them and kill them.

Right.

Right.

And that's our main relation.

The percentage of cows and pigs

are the mammals.

Of mammals, humans, cows, and pigs are 96%.

of all the mammals on earth now.

And that, of course, is a radical difference from what it was, you know, 500 years ago.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Because we feel like we are more powerful than they are.

And there's no sense for

the fact that we're all a part of one

respect that, you know, it like it shows this hubris that we have shows in the fact that the world is being unbalanced by us.

We have this extreme weather, we have the climate disruption, we have the deforestation, we have the decline.

Since I was 15 years old in high school, the average population of wild animals has declined 70%, 7-0%,

since I was in high school.

If we're so powerful and we're so smart, why aren't we taking care of the miracle of the world that made us and maintains us?

Because we don't get it.

I'm afraid we don't.

I'm afraid we don't.

Could you speak to, because you were talking about, I think, the Australian shepherd that you took into your home, the Australian Shepherd that was losing its mind in the apartment.

And often I see people,

I know I'm going to get complaints about it, but in New York City with these huge dogs

in little apartments, and I feel for that dog.

That's why I was saying that I didn't really like dogs because being around them was often so uncomfortable because

the dog and the situation were so badly matched.

And that was the case with black people.

Shouldn't people consider that, though, when they're getting a dog?

Absolutely.

You should consider what's good for you but also what's going to be good for the dog right right what is it what is this breed's energy level an australian shepherd wants to herd they know they have no business being up in an apartment right exactly exactly but she she came with us it took a few months for her to adjust I remember the first time we brought her to the beach with our other two dogs.

We immediately just, they're all always loose at the beach, always off leash.

And she's looking around.

She was with us like two days at that point.

So we start walking down the beach and she's like, oh, oh, that's my family down there.

Okay, I better keep up with them.

And there were other people, other dogs.

She knew right away that

it was mainly us she was supposed to key into, right?

And then this was really, really interesting.

She ran way, way down the beach, ran after something.

And I said, okay,

let's just turn around

and see what happens.

And let's show her that, you know,

when we go this way, you need to know, right?

So we go, and always our other two dogs, they immediately turn around with us because that's the routine.

Well,

Jude, he would have none of this and none of leaving that new puppy out there.

He laid down with his butt to us, and he just waited and watched for her.

And when she caught up to where he was lying down, he got up and he turned around.

Yeah.

And that happened almost immediately after.

Yeah,

almost immediately.

Yeah.

Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

So what can you finally tell us, what is beyond words?

What is the energy that is beyond words when it comes to animals and the way they think and feel?

People have explicitly said that humans can only think because we have language.

Yeah.

And this is simply not the case.

There is so much that is beyond words.

There is so much understanding.

There is so much bonding.

There is so much emotion.

There is so much understanding of who we are and where we are and who we are because of who we're with that does not have words to it.

We have kind of lost track of that.

When you go to your house, you don't say, oh, this is my house.

Oh, that is my refrigerator.

Oh, that is my spouse.

The recognition is instant, and that's our animal recognition of who we are.

And that's what the world is filled with.

It's filled with this kind of recognition and understanding.

And we just don't know.

Wow.

Thank you.

Oprah, thank you so much.

This has been a thrill.

Oh, so delighted that you could come all this way.

Very well worth it.

Carl's nonprofit is called the Safina Center, and their mission is to advance the case for all life on Earth by bringing together scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action.

You can learn more at safinacenter.org.

I thank you, Dr.

Gregory Burns.

Dr.

Burns' book is How Dogs Love Us and Cow Puppy and Carl's books, including Beyond Words, which I love so much, and Alfie and Me, are all available now wherever you get your books.

Thank you, Amanda, and thank you, Gabriel, Gabby, and Christina, for zooming with us.

And a special thank you to all the dogs.

All the dogs.

Thank you all for listening and watching.

See you next week.

You can subscribe to the Oprah podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

I'll see you next week.

Thanks, everybody.