Can we ever know our dogs?

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Speaker 14 We just project our emotions onto animals, and that has always just like sat wrong for me.

Speaker 15 I believe that I can read my dog's mind.

Speaker 16 And I think we have to try to take the dog's point of view.

Speaker 17 A couple weeks ago, I went to my friend's backyard to see him play a show.

Speaker 1 So, from here on out, it's only songs about dogs.

Speaker 17 A literal dog show.

Speaker 17 Well, a good dog on the ground's worth free in the saddle.

Speaker 2 No matter where you're from. Been many good dogs who was

Speaker 17 I'm Noah Hasenfeld, by the way, sitting in for JQ this week.

Speaker 17 And I'm not exactly a dog guy. I mean, I'm not a hater.
I love petting a fuzzy puppy in a sunny spot as much as the next guy. But these people at this show,

Speaker 17 these were dog people.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 18 a three-legged dog walks into a saloon and he says,

Speaker 14 I'm looking for the man who shot my paw.

Speaker 17 And then there was me, Douglas, watching a band called the Beagles run through their greatest hits.

Speaker 17 Everyone seemed like they were having a great time. The people seemed happy, the dogs seemed happy.
But as I was sitting there, I started wondering, am I sure?

Speaker 17 Like, I barely know what other people are feeling. How could I be sure about a dog? So I was excited when I found out a listener was wondering the same thing.

Speaker 1 The things that we perceive through our human lens to be sad or happy or whatever it might be, is that actually what's happening in the dog's brain?

Speaker 17 This question came from Jared Martin, who's a filmmaker living in L.A.

Speaker 1 But probably more important than that is my little child here,

Speaker 1 my child, dog child here, Enzo.

Speaker 17 Enzo, tell me about Enzo.

Speaker 1 So Enzo is two and a half. He'll be three in early September.
I've had him since he was about eight weeks old. He's a,

Speaker 1 he's trying to get out of my lap right now.

Speaker 1 He's a, he's a mix, a total mutt. And yeah, I got him.
I recently, I lived with a roommate for like over 10 years.

Speaker 1 moved out on my own and I was like, thought it would be great. And then I got really lonely and I was like, well, I kind of, I kind of want to get a dog.
And we found each other.

Speaker 1 It was just kind of like the stars aligned and the rest is history.

Speaker 17 How well do you think you guys communicate?

Speaker 1 There seems to be something like a special connection that we have, I feel, that's different than other interactions I've had with dogs, but also like dogs that I've had, you know, in my, in my life.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's like sometimes I can just like look at him.
or I'll kind of give him a look, you know, like you might give a small child and they know what you're thinking. Yeah,

Speaker 1 because he does have these little like

Speaker 1 talkative moments where he he doesn't bark, he doesn't growl. It's like a he's like mouthing actual words.
And I sent a video of that.

Speaker 17 We can see that was a crazy video. Enzo

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 Enzo wanted to play with a specific toy,

Speaker 1 and I told him, No, not right now,

Speaker 1 not right now,

Speaker 1 and it felt like a like a moody teenager in a way, like

Speaker 1 talking back.

Speaker 1 That's how I took it.

Speaker 17 You're saying that like he understands you. Do you feel like you understand him? Like you can look at him and know what he's feeling?

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's definitely times where that happens too. And he has sort of different ways of, I guess you could say, talking to me, depending on what he wants.
He'll make different sounds

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 different things.

Speaker 1 Like I know the sound he, like, when he's hungry, he sort of behaves differently and he'll make a different sound versus like, if he wants to go to the dog park, and I, I just said his trigger word, but if he wants to go to the dog park, it's a, it's a very specific sound.

Speaker 1 He's getting my attention in a specific way versus like when he's hungry, like, it's just a certain,

Speaker 1 I guess, like energy level that I'm picking up on. I, I don't know.
I tend to do that just with other humans too, in terms of like, I, I sense people's,

Speaker 1 sounds very cliche, I'm an empath, right? Like,

Speaker 1 I can pick up on people's energy, and I feel like I can do the same with him.

Speaker 17 Lots of our listeners feel like Jared. They know their dogs.
They get their dogs.

Speaker 19 Hi, my name is Chelsea and I really feel like I can communicate with my dog. Her name is Sweet Pea.

Speaker 19 She is a Chiweeni

Speaker 19 and she taught herself how to say yes to things.

Speaker 20 So we adopted our dog Rico

Speaker 20 a couple of years ago. He was a

Speaker 20 Puerto Rican street dog and

Speaker 20 from the moment I met him, I knew that he was going to be my soul dog.

Speaker 15 I've had my dog Vixen since I was 19 years old.

Speaker 20 I adopted her when I was in college.

Speaker 15 She is like my aunt entire life. I call her the love of my life and my husband gets super annoyed, but it's true.
There you have it.

Speaker 15 I believe that I can read my dog's mind maybe i'm projecting but i don't care i believe it's true

Speaker 1 but at a certain level even jared isn't sure i definitely feel these things and i i just don't yeah there there's sort of a disconnect there too of like am i actually

Speaker 1 understanding this the way i think i am can we ask enzo a question yes enzo ask enzo if he thinks you understand him enzo do you understand me

Speaker 1 Do you understand me?

Speaker 2 Yeah?

Speaker 16 No?

Speaker 1 He's like,

Speaker 1 where's the reward?

Speaker 17 This week, on Explain It To Me, we're going to ask the question Enzo refuses to answer. Do we actually know what our dogs are feeling?

Speaker 17 Or are we just fooling ourselves?

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Speaker 17 Lots of people are obsessed with animals, and it makes sense why. On the one hand, they're like aliens, and on the other, there's this feeling that they're just like us.

Speaker 17 You can see this in movies like Airbud or Babe or Babe, Pig in the City.

Speaker 21 My human tied me in a bat and throwed me in the water.

Speaker 17 And yeah, it's fun to suspend our disbelief a little and watch a dog play basketball. But even serious documentaries do this, like March of the Penguins.

Speaker 1 They're not that different from us, really.

Speaker 1 They pout,

Speaker 1 they bellow,

Speaker 2 they strut.

Speaker 17 You get the sense that so many people who are looking at animals are just searching for the little humans inside the outer shell.

Speaker 17 But there are some people who don't spend their time trying to find the little humans inside. They're obsessed with how alien animals are.

Speaker 14 I grew up watching Animal Planet. I started when I was like three years old, and I thought what makes animals so cool was they're not human.

Speaker 17 Holly Molinaro is a researcher and a dog lover who just finished up her PhD at Arizona State.

Speaker 14 I have this vivid memory of first grade watching an ant crawl across the window.

Speaker 14 And my teacher yelled at me because I wasn't paying attention. But I was just fascinated with like, what could this ant be thinking?

Speaker 14 There's no way it's just like thinking human thoughts walking along the window.

Speaker 17 Holly had the same question our listener, Jared, did. The same question I did.
Can we ever understand what animals are feeling?

Speaker 14 I know from my own personal experience, like we just project our emotions onto animals. We think we know that what they're feeling.

Speaker 14 And that has always just like sat wrong for me like throughout my whole life.

Speaker 14 Even though it's so fun to do, like my cat's sitting in my lap now, like, oh my gosh, she's obviously loving me so much right now.

Speaker 14 But in terms of taking care of them, those like biases can get in the way.

Speaker 17 She did find some research that made it seem like even trying to understand other humans could be hard.

Speaker 17 There were these researchers that photoshopped the face of someone with one expression onto different kinds of body postures. So postures that were disgusted or sad or afraid or angry.

Speaker 17 But when people looked at these images, even though the face was the same, people thought the emotions were different. They cared more about the context of the picture than the actual face.

Speaker 14 And so I was like, what if we just did this with dogs? What if I changed things around the dog and asked people the same question? What do you think the dog is feeling?

Speaker 17 So Holly designed a study.

Speaker 14 This study is called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Human perception of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors.

Speaker 17 She started with Zoom.

Speaker 14 It was like, you know, 2021, so pandemic time still. And just like Zoom blurs out the background, I was like, well, I feel like I could figure out how to do that.

Speaker 17 Oh, like blur out everything except the dog? Yeah. Interesting.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Took a crash course in video editing on YouTube, you know,

Speaker 14 and figured out that you can like take away the background with software editing. But then I needed dogs to do it.

Speaker 14 And I go home for Christmas break and I see my dad and my dog interacting. And I was like, this is perfect.

Speaker 17 Can you tell me about your family dog?

Speaker 14 Yeah, Oliver. He sadly passed away a couple years ago.
So it's really sweet that his memory now lives on in this research. He was like a beagle, boxer, pointer mix.

Speaker 14 We got him from a shelter when I was like in fifth grade. And him and my dad were like so tight.

Speaker 14 So we cleared out the living room. We moved all the furniture away.
And I just asked my dad to do things that people would think is positive.

Speaker 14 So like seeing a leash, seeing a treat, getting praised, being played with, and then things that people would think Oliver doesn't like. So seeing the cat, the vacuum cleaner, being reprimanded.

Speaker 14 And I just filmed everything to make sure that I got like a bunch of videos that I could then figure out how to edit them.

Speaker 17 So if you're trying to study whether we can tell if dogs are happy or sad,

Speaker 17 how do you know if Oliver likes cats or vacuums in the first place?

Speaker 14 One was just like we wanted to do like general perceptions of people. So like what would generally people associate positive or negative with dogs.

Speaker 14 But that is like a good point that has been brought up a lot is that I don't really know how Oliver was feeling with those things.

Speaker 14 You'd need to actually do some different type of studies to see how Oliver was actually feeling.

Speaker 17 But ultimately, in fairness to you, right, like you're not studying what Oliver is feeling, right? You're studying what we think he's feeling.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 14 So I edited the video, so all you saw was Oliver on a black background.

Speaker 14 And then I set up this survey, sent it out to ASU psychology undergraduates. We had like 400 participants in the first study and first showed them six videos of Oliver on a black background.

Speaker 14 So three were when Oliver was in a positive situation and three were when Oliver was in a negative situation and showed them just the video of Oliver on a black background and said how happy or sad do you think Oliver is and also how calm or agitated.

Speaker 14 And then we showed them the original videos with my dad in there. You could see everything

Speaker 14 and this time their responses were different. So before when they couldn't see the background, all they saw was Oliver, they could not tell the difference between positive or negative videos.

Speaker 14 But suddenly, when they could see everything, they saw the context, they saw my dad, they rated the positive videos as Oliver feeling happy, and they rated the negative videos as Oliver feeling sad.

Speaker 17 Can you show me some of these videos?

Speaker 14 Let me open up my Dropbox. Okay, here we go.

Speaker 14 So you can see that.

Speaker 2 Oh, he's so cute.

Speaker 14 Okay, I'll play it.

Speaker 17 Kind of like looking around, licking his chops a little bit.

Speaker 17 Seems kind of like a neutral.

Speaker 14 Okay, so what would you think the dog is feeling?

Speaker 17 I would say he seems relatively happy. Okay.

Speaker 16 All right.

Speaker 14 Now.

Speaker 2 All right, ready? Uh-huh.

Speaker 17 Oh, God. No, he seems so sad now.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so Oliver looks exactly the same, but now that I see your dad yelling at him, it seems like he's learning a lesson now. Yes.

Speaker 17 So what do you think this study tells us about us or about dogs or how we relate to dogs?

Speaker 14 I think number one, we're just not as smart as we think we are when it comes to understanding our dogs. And sometimes people are like, that's really depressing, Holly.
And I'm like, no, no, it's okay.

Speaker 14 Cause now we can actually start to pay attention.

Speaker 14 Now we can like recognize that we do this and start to look at our own dogs and just kind of get away from like blanket statements of, oh, tail wagging equals happiness, barking equals upset, and actually pay attention to your own dog.

Speaker 14 I'm also trying to develop a new theory for animal emotion.

Speaker 17 A new theory of animal emotion or a new theory of dog emotion?

Speaker 14 My proposed theory is just to start from like a species-specific point of view.

Speaker 14 And maybe like dogs have their own set of emotions and try to figure out what emotional capabilities they might have that we humans could never even comprehend because we're not dogs.

Speaker 14 So instead of looking for what does happiness look in a dog, let's come up with just like a brand new word. Maybe dogs have some type of like

Speaker 14 happiness, but it's like subservience because they like love to do things for us.

Speaker 14 And then we can like look at their behavior in this context and kind of piece together bits and then come up with a whole new dog emotion.

Speaker 17 That's really interesting. So you're kind of saying,

Speaker 17 let's not try to put them on our terms. Let's see them on their terms.

Speaker 14 Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 17 So what if we stop treating dogs like fuzzy little humans? What would it be like to see dogs on their terms, not ours? In a minute, we talked to a human who tried to become a dog.

Speaker 17 Woof.

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Speaker 17 Why don't we start with

Speaker 17 your name and what you do, like how you'd introduce yourself at a dinner party?

Speaker 16 Well, I might not say this at a dinner party because then the whole dinner party will be about dogs. But I'm Alexandra Horowitz and I run the dog cognition lab at Barnard College in New York City.

Speaker 16 And I study what it's like to be a dog.

Speaker 17 That is one thing. You're right.

Speaker 17 You can't say that to people. It'll just derail any conversation.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's really, if I want myself to be the center of attention, that's, I guess, a thing to say. But often I don't.
So yeah, I don't lead with it.

Speaker 17 Okay. So in the previous segment, we just heard how people can misinterpret their dogs.
They can maybe think they're feeling something and maybe they're not feeling something.

Speaker 17 But you,

Speaker 17 you know exactly what they're feeling, right?

Speaker 16 Definitely not.

Speaker 16 But that's, that is entirely what I'm interested in. Okay.
Sure.

Speaker 16 And I guess part of the first step is to kind of forget about my automatic automatic assumptions about what they're feeling which is which is a very normal step for people to take especially people who who live with dogs but it's from our point of view and I think we have to try to take the dog's point of view.

Speaker 17 Okay, so how do you start to take the dog's point of view? What does that even mean?

Speaker 16 So they are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense.

Speaker 16 And my interest is in saying like, well, okay, like let's try to understand the dog's way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they're just like us, you know, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I'm sitting on the couch.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I think the best way maybe to describe what it's like to take that seriously, to take sort of a nose-first perspective of the world, is to ask you about your experience doing this.

Speaker 17 You kind of did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog. How would I put that?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, I tried to sort of step into some of the dogs' behaviors, I guess, in order to a little bit understand them. Because here's one thing about smell versus vision.

Speaker 16 We're visual creatures, let's acknowledge, right? We see the world first.

Speaker 16 But if you're a smelling creature, I thought, well, you know, how do you see the world? Smells don't just appear when you open your nose, when you exist in the space.

Speaker 16 If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right?

Speaker 16 They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground or smelling objects that are nose height, and they sniff a lot more than we do.

Speaker 16 You know, our sniffs are pretty feeble little sniffs, and they'll do

Speaker 16 seven sniffs a second if they want to get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things.

Speaker 16 I mean, that was just the first step is going around and saying like, all right, what are smells like down at dog height? And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it? it?

Speaker 17 I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here.

Speaker 17 You're walking around. Where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height?

Speaker 16 Well, I did this in New York City, right where I live.

Speaker 17 So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it's New York City.

Speaker 16 Oh, no. Oh, people moved away from me.
You know, that's for sure. That's not.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 16 But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did, where he sniffed. I would lean down and sniff with him.

Speaker 16 I would get to his height, see what he sniffed, and try to smell it myself, right?

Speaker 16 Is it a tree post protecting a tree from

Speaker 16 people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass, something in the grass that is super interesting to him that I try to smell?

Speaker 16 I didn't sniff other dog butts because there are other issues involved there. But if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.

Speaker 17 What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog?

Speaker 16 Well, I think that the big lesson for me was that unlike the way I had kind of characterized smells in my life, which I think is very human,

Speaker 16 as kind of good or bad, right? Smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell or something unappealing. Like in New York, there are lots of those smells, like garbage in the summer.

Speaker 16 But for dogs, I think smells are just information. They're just information about the way the world is.
So their world is wrought of smells the way ours is wrought of visual images.

Speaker 17 You know, when I think of looking at the world, I kind of create, I don't know, a spatial map of the world, right? Like I'll walk through my apartment and I'll look around. Here's the door.

Speaker 17 Here's the window. Here's the hall.
If you're doing something like that through smell,

Speaker 17 on the one hand, I have no idea what that means, right? I have no idea how to wrap my head around that. But what does that mean for the world you live in if you're mapping it by smelling it?

Speaker 16 Well, a space inside, I think, is sort of redefined in smell as being less.

Speaker 16 static, right? So smells move. That's one of the interesting things about them.

Speaker 16 So we know this. You have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table, and you can smell it on the other side of the table, right? This smell comes out of it.
So where that coffee is

Speaker 16 is like a slightly different space, maybe to a, let's say, purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature.

Speaker 16 It's right in the cup to me, but to somebody who's seeing the world through smell, it's in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air.

Speaker 17 Oh, that's fascinating.

Speaker 16 That doesn't mean that there's nothing concrete and real. It just means that it's a little more transient than we see.

Speaker 17 Yeah, if I were to think about what that means for what it's like to be a dog, right?

Speaker 17 It feels a lot more chaotic. I mean, if I'm, again, walking through my apartment, if I go into my living room and I'm like, okay, here's the couch.
It's just... right here.

Speaker 17 I can put my hand on part on the couch and then I can put my hand a little bit to the side and there's no couch.

Speaker 17 And I feel like if I just smelled everything,

Speaker 17 everything would be kind of

Speaker 17 moving and fading and coming back. And it would be blurry and chaotic.

Speaker 16 I think chaos, the idea that it's chaotic is just because

Speaker 16 we aren't using our noses this way.

Speaker 16 If you look at dogs' behavior, it doesn't seem very chaotic. I mean, their behavior kind of is consistent with

Speaker 16 this just very organized but different way of seeing.

Speaker 17 It also feels like if if things that a dog is smelling are changing all the time, it feels like the way they might be interacting with the world would depend a lot on time.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think time is in smell.

Speaker 16 My presence in this room really smells to my dog. And when I've been gone for an hour, I think I'm still sort of in the room to them, but a little less.

Speaker 16 And after a day, I'm a lot less in the room.

Speaker 16 And so they're sort of noting time, time passing by the changeability of smells.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 17 That is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad. I don't know.
Imagining you fading slowly out of a room, it feels like a very different type of thing to experience.

Speaker 16 Yeah, maybe. I haven't ever thought of it as sad.

Speaker 16 I mean, in a way, it's there's something reassuring in the fact, and maybe even alarming, I suppose, but that I'm still here when I'm not here for them, right?

Speaker 16 And that when I come home and I've pet another dog or I've had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, that they can kind of experience that by just smelling me and seeing where I've been.

Speaker 16 To me, that's kind of extra neat, not melancholy.

Speaker 17 You know, a lot of the people we've heard from in this episode, they talk about this ability to understand their dog and this connection they have.

Speaker 17 And then talking to Holly, talking to you, we're actually just really different from dogs. We can connect with dogs.
We have these points of overlap. We can have relationships.

Speaker 17 But we are clearly extremely, extremely different.

Speaker 17 What does that difference mean to you? Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting?

Speaker 16 I mean, as an experimenter, I do find it daunting that they're quite different than

Speaker 16 we are perceptually and therefore probably cognitively, but also exciting, right? There's a lot of possibilities, a lot of things we can investigate and learn.

Speaker 16 As a person who lives with dogs, there's the mystery of it, the mystery of what it's like to be a smelling creature and how we kind of get, even though there's this fundamental difference between us, we coexist and seem to share a lot of things, at at least share space during the day, right?

Speaker 16 Share a life. I find that mystery kind of delightful, and I don't try to solve it in my ordinary life.

Speaker 17 You know, we've been hearing from listeners about whether they understand their dogs and a lot of them are like, yeah, totally.

Speaker 17 And I wonder, you know, you're someone who understands exactly how much we don't understand our dogs.

Speaker 17 But I'm also curious, do you think you understand your dogs?

Speaker 16 Oh, no.

Speaker 2 Uh-uh.

Speaker 16 Definitely not. I mean, I don't think I do.
And I don't know how anybody could, really.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 16 they're familiar to me. And we use all the anthropomorphic words that everybody uses to talk about our sense of whether they're feeling

Speaker 16 depressed or grumpy or proud or whatever. But that's just a gloss for me.
I don't really know what they're like and what their feelings are at any moment and

Speaker 16 whether they'd choose to stay with me if they had an option. You know, it's a very puzzling thing living with dogs and I'm okay with that.

Speaker 16 As a scientist, I think

Speaker 16 I've just grown more and more agnostic. You know, I just feel like I know less and less in some ways

Speaker 16 because I see how much more I didn't even imagine

Speaker 16 was out there.

Speaker 16 And that's delightful to me. Yeah.
It's not to me about pinning it down and saying, well, now we have the answers. I mean, what's the fun in that? Then something that's pinned down and

Speaker 16 sort of completely understood, you put that away. You know,

Speaker 16 I like that it's that knowledge is ever elusive.

Speaker 17 Kind of like a dog.

Speaker 16 At least one that you keep, though it doesn't come when you call.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 17 this episode was produced by miles bryan it was edited by our executive producer miranda kennedy and noreen kahn fact-checking by melissa hirsch engineering by patrick boyd and before we let you go we want to ask about ai friendships do you have regular conversations with your friends known as ChatGPT or Quad or Gemini?

Speaker 17 We're not talking intimate relationships, but if you do have regular chats with some kind of LLM, we want to hear from you. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545.

Speaker 17 I'm Noam Hasenfeld. This is Explain It To Me.
And once again, meet the Beagles.

Speaker 17 Cook some breakfast, wash the dishes,

Speaker 17 let the dog in, let the cat out.

Speaker 17 Let the dog in, let the cat out, let the cat in, let the dog out, let him move in.

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