Every dog training book holds out
the premise of the perfect puppy
or ten ways to assure a good dog.
But science tells us
that this is all wrong.
Your dog's misbehavior
is telling you one thing,
and it's not that they're a bad dog.
What it's telling you is how
they experience the world
differently from you.
Understanding this is the key
to raising a happy dog.
So I want to make two points to clarify
what misbehaviors actually are.
The first, misbehavior isn't misbehavior.
It's communication.
It's information gathering.
It's surprise, it's excitement,
sometimes it's boredom.
It's a glimpse into the stage
of life they're in.
For instance, it's communication.
Barking at a guest.
We call it rude, but it's not rude,
they are telling you something,
“Someone is here.”
And you're encouraging that
as you go right to the door,
often barking back at them in our own way.
Congratulations, you're in conversation.
It's information gathering.
A dog sniffing you closely isn't impolite.
Dogs see the world through their noses.
Up close, they are looking at you,
finding out about you.
Their noses have the acuity to tell
where you've been, what you've eaten,
even if you've been secretly
petting another dog.
It's telling us about the stage
of life they're in.
If you have a dog who's between
about six months and two years old,
you don’t have, as commonly
assumed, a puppy.
You, my friend, have a teenager,
an adolescent in a mature 30-year-old body
going through a phase.
Just like the 14-year-old boy’s
sometimes erratic behavior --
distant or argumentative --
this phase in dogs is driven by hormones.
Those that lead to sexual maturity
also have other consequences,
like increased sensitivity
to touch and less self control.
Their brains are literally being rewired,
especially in areas that regulate
emotions and making judgments.
You might see more challenges
to your authority.
They might alternate shying
from you and clinging to you.
There might be more chewing of things.
Chewing in particular may be a way
to help lower their stress hormone levels.
So misbehavior isn't best described
as misbehavior at all.
The second point is this.
What we read as dog misbehavior
is really our misbehavior.
It's our fault.
If their behavior seems wrong to us,
it highlights that we have not conveyed
to the dog what matters to us
in a way that they can understand.
Dogs are not born understanding
the sometimes Byzantine rules
of human social interaction,
or the rules of our home,
or what we consider appropriate behavior.
Dogs don't have a clue
about the pronouns we give to items.
"That's my bed, that's your bed."
Or the identities we give to objects.
"That's a shoe, and that's a chew toy."
My research has actually shown
that even when we think they know
they've done something wrong,
giving the guilty look
that is familiar to many dog people,
this look isn't a sign of guilt.
It's a learned submissive display
that they put on when we're angry
so we don't punish them.
And it's actually pretty good at that.
Often their seeming misbehavior
is actually a poorly designed environment
on our part.
You don’t leave kids alone with knives,
and we shouldn’t leave dogs
alone with a cheese plate.
If you leave a pair
of your favorite shoes,
that smell like you,
in the middle of the living room
as you leave the house,
you have designed your environment
to include special
you-smelling items in it.
Enrichment devices.
Your dog will take to it
and interact with your shoes
in a way you might find objectionable.
In other words, it's on us.
Once we begin to see
that this thing we've been
calling "misbehavior"
can be more productively translated
into what the dog is actually doing,
living among dogs changes for us.
Misbehavior becomes an opportunity
to see into what the Austrian scientist
Jakob von Uexküll called the umwelt --
the worldview or the perspective
of another species.
The profound change in my own life
after studying dogs
was that it completely overthrew
how I looked at my own dog.
Dog chasing a bike?
It's a glimpse into their
evolutionary history.
Descent of ancient wolves
with a vestigial urge to chase
quickly-moving things which could be prey.
Stop the bike and you stop the chase.
Similarly, your dog’s jumping on you
and licking your face in greeting?
This, too, can be traced back
to their ancestry.
A hunting wolf returns to the pack
to be mobbed by pack mates in greeting
who would lick him or her around the face.
In their case, they're trying
to prompt the wolf
to regurgitate a little bit of the food
that they just hunted.
If you don't want your dog to jump,
bend down to their height.
If you spat up a little of your sandwich,
I think they'd be okay with that too.
Deeply smelling into each other's fur,
their close smelling of us or every guest,
it’s a peek into their
perceptual experience
as olfactory creatures
with hundreds of millions more olfactory
receptor cells in their nose than we have.
So take them for a smell walk
to exercise those noses,
where they lead the way
and sniff to their heart's content.
A dog's misbehavior is a chance
for you to learn about this alien creature
that we've all become
accustomed to seeing,
but who is misunderstood.
When we see their communications,
we're able to listen.
When we see what they perceive,
we bring ourselves one step
closer to dogness.
In the end, we'll wind up
with better relationship with our pups.
And isn't that what we're aiming for?
Thanks.
Whitney Pennington Rodgers:
I think it's interesting how,
in your opening talk
and really in the book as well,
the big focus is how we just
don't really understand
what "misbehavior" in dogs
is actually telling us.
What is your take on why this is something
that's really challenging
for dog parents, if you will,
versus dog owners,
for dog parents to really grasp?
Alexandra Horowitz: People who have had
sequential dog relationships even
are still surprised by this, I think.
Because ...
what we see publicly of dogs
is usually very cooperative
interactions with people, right?
The dogs you see on the street
or when you go to the park
or when you're hiking or whatever it is,
are dogs who are kind of cooperatively
going along with a person
as though they completely understand
what this is about.
And in some ways they do get
to that point where,
if not fully understanding
what's happening all the time,
they are flexible enough behaviorally
to go along with what their human family
asks and wants to do.
But that doesn't happen instantly, right?
And so we feel giving this appearance of,
or even the memory of a past dog
who was so cooperative,
who felt like they knew your emotions
and could anticipate
what you were going to do,
this new dog hasn't learned all that yet,
and we feel as though that should
come with them a little bit.
That should come as part
of their genetic makeup.
Their ability to become sensitive
to human behavior
and learn a lot about humans
is part of their genetic makeup,
but not the understanding.
And so it's quite a steep curve
to go from knowing dog
to knowing dog and human
and being like, cleanly
slipping into human society.
WPR: Well, one thing I also really
appreciate is the parallel you draw.
And I think we talked about this before,
just the parallel you draw between
being a human parent and a dog parent.
And I'm a fairly new parent.
I have an almost two-year-old human child.
And just curious what sort of skills
you see that parents can take
from their experiences in raising a dog.
AH: It's interesting because people
do talk about raising a dog
as a kind of prelude to having a baby.
But I feel like having a baby prepared
me for having a puppy, you know,
(Laughs)
kind of a long period of no sleep
at night, you know,
where a child is sort of learning
to settle themselves over the night.
I mean, the puppy
is going to do the same thing.
But if you view it the other way,
the more traditional way
of the puppy as prelude,
it's having a completely
dependent creature, right?
Dogs can get around on their own,
but by being put into a home --
I live in an apartment,
but -- or a house --
they're dependent on us
for all the things.
And we kind of forget that, right?
Like, we decide when they eat,
we decide when they can go out
and relieve themselves.
We decide when they get to exercise.
We decide, often it's us deciding
when we want to socialize
and when we need them to be quiet.
So their entire life is structured
in this human way.
This is what happens to a child as well,
more slowly over time,
because really a new parent, as you know,
has to kind of restructure
their own life around the baby.
But the point is
that the baby will eventually
be able to sit cooperatively next to you
while you do your Zoom
and entertain herself, right?
But with the puppy,
we're expecting basically that
from a non-human
and we're also not giving them
several years to learn.
We're assuming that they're going
to learn it relatively instantly
and always be cooperative, you know,
and sort of, get what it's all about.
We really don't.
The child, at least,
the satisfaction of having a child,
is that they do get it, right?
You can eventually talk to them
using a language and they can understand
and appreciate what you're saying
and imparting in that language.
And the dog, even the really
high-excelling, word-learning dogs
don't understand our language,
and yet we're still talking to them
as though they do.
That's fine with me.
I love people talking to dogs
and I talk to dogs.
Just, let’s not pretend that they ...
understand what we’re saying.
WPR: This is -- great tips.
And you should know, Alexandra,
that we are getting lots and lots
of questions in from our members.
And so I want to dive into
some of those ...
So we have a question
from TED Member Ann. They ask,
"I'd love to know how to better manage
a multi-dog household
across three generations:
13, eight and four years old.”
AH: Right.
That's a great question
and congratulations on having
such a large dog household.
That's great fun.
I think one thing to realize, too,
when we have multiple dogs
is that these dogs are still
really individuals, right?
Everybody knows that if they
have their own single dog,
you feel like your dog
is completely special.
When you have multiple dogs,
you still have multiple individuals
and they really have to be treated
separately, right? ...
Probably your 13-year-old has preferences
that your eight-year-old doesn't share.
Some things they'll be able to do
together and cooperatively,
but I would expect as often or more often
that they need to have their own time.
They maybe need to have their own time
with you or whoever the person is
who they're bonded to or attached
in the household.
WPR: And we also have a couple
of questions about language,
sort of what you were saying earlier,
that dogs will never be able
to really speak our language.
Just a question around whether or not,
how much they’re actually understanding.
So both TED Member Gordon
and TED Member Agatha,
they have this question
around whether dogs
understand tones and gestures,
and Agatha specifically has a question
about buttons that dogs can press
to communicate in human language,
whether or not those really
improve communication
and if dogs really even understand
what those buttons mean.
AH: Yeah so I mean,
dogs are definitely understanding
a good amount of what we say, right?
They learn words and some dogs
are extremely good at learning words
and we know Chaser, you know,
this famous border collie
who learned a thousand words.
John Pilley, who worked with Chaser,
spent eight hours a day,
every day, working with Chaser
so that she would learn
eventually a thousand words,
and -- they were toys --
and a couple of different verbs or actions
which she could take with them.
It was semantically
and syntactically, you know,
unprecedented for dogs and really neat,
it shows their capacity.
But unless you're really specifically
and clearly talking to dogs
eight hours a day
about very limited items,
your dog is not going to pick
those things up.
There's no reason to expect they would.
That doesn't mean that there's no
communication already happening, right?
And I think what the button apparatuses
that have gotten popular
and have yet to be completely,
you know, subject
to science's scrutiny, by the way,
there's no evidence that those ...
actually represent
what the dogs are thinking
or are extending
their communication ability.
What they are potentially doing, though,
is putting into a kind of
language we understand
something that the dog is interested in
but is already showing in some other way.
So if I'm a dog and I want to go outside,
I can show you by --
based on, you know, different dogs
do it differently, maybe barking,
coming over to you
and trying to get your attention,
looking at the door,
walking over to the door,
bringing a leash to you.
Lots of things like that
are communications.
If instead, if as a person,
I ignore all of those communications,
but I also have a button as a dog
which I could push,
which says, "I want to go outside,"
maybe that will get us to listen.
But I don't think that that's something
that the dog is trying to communicate
and can't until they have the button.
The best that it can do,
as far as we know now,
is potentially make it easier
for us to understand.
But I do think that communication
is already present.
They are highly,
highly skilled communicators
and they understand a lot
of what we're talking about,
but not in the kind of linguistic way
that humans think is so important,
that enables us to have this Zoom today.
And I think to deny them that
is not to deny them the interest in
or the ability to communicate.
WPR: TED Member Ginger is curious
about the best and earliest age
to start training a dog
and also connects to this,
is curious about your thoughts
about electronic training collars
and behavioral training.
AH: Yeah, well to start
with the first part there,
I mean, as I say,
I don't explicitly train dogs,
which doesn't mean I don't prepare them
to be in human society
and to live cooperatively
and happily with our family.
I do.
For me, that started with actually
socialization of the dog to other dogs,
other people, and lots
of different types of noises
and surprising things
before we got the dog.
And that means in the first several weeks,
maybe after about four weeks
of their life, from four to nine weeks,
they're in what's called
a socialization period
where they really need to be exposed
to lots of types of situations
that they might encounter later.
And if they are then,
then they become acclimated to them.
And that is a kind of training, right?
It's not like training to come
or training to sit,
but it’s training them
that this is their world.
There are airplanes flying overhead,
there are people coming out of cars.
You'll see new dogs and people
and there are cats and there are birds.
And in that period, they react calmly
and with interest and curiosity.
If you don't expose dogs
to lots of different sounds
and people and things ...
in this socialization period,
which usually extends till after
dogs are adopted from a litter,
then they might be fearful.
They have difficulty
dealing with those things.
They get very anxious, they might become
aggressive to those things.
So that type of training starts
as soon as you meet them, basically.
And I think that will lead
to the best solution.
As to the second part of that, quickly,
electronic collars I despise.
There's no reason
to use electronic collars
or stimulation with any dog ever,
as far as I'm concerned.
What it teaches is that ... they
will be randomly punished.
You know, they have
a very hard time associating that
with the behavior that they just did.
And this harkens back
to what I was saying in the talk,
which is our concept of what a behavior is
or what an object is,
“this is my shoe,” right,
like, that that somehow
is going to be a meaningful
and important bit of knowledge for a dog
to know that they shouldn't chew it.
Similarly, if they're just walking
along in a property
and then something zaps them on the neck
because they've hit
an invisible fence, say,
they might learn to avoid
that whole area of the property,
they might learn to stop walking,
they might learn that the bird they saw
right at that moment, coincidentally,
is something to be feared.
You know, they don't associate it
with the thing we want them to,
which is, "oh, there's a property line
around your property,"
or, "oh, you've just barked,
so stop barking," right?
So it's a very poor learning device
and it can also be harmful.
WPR: And we actually even have a question
from TED Member Dimitris,
about whether or not you can teach
an old dog new tricks
and really, how old is old?
But maybe, could you share
a little bit more
about what development looks like
after that first year?
We're not seeing a complete plateau,
of course, but what do we see?
AH: Well, so most dogs,
it's different by breed or mix,
but most dogs will still be in adolescence
till about two years old.
So you can expect
that they will have kind of reached
their full size more or less,
maybe by about a year,
maybe will grow a little bit more.
But they're still kind of teenagers
and they're really big,
strong teenagers with a lot of energy.
And so in that second year of life,
often they're still sometimes
really disobedient,
not cooperative and impulsive
and clingy at one moment
and then the next moment,
like, don't want to have
anything to do with you, right?
So that continues.
There continue to be
socialization opportunities.
I said there was a strong
socialization period
where you want to expose them to things
that they might encounter later in life
so that they have
the best interaction with them.
That still is the case,
just to a lesser degree,
through their second year
where their brains
are still changing, right?
Just like the adolescent brain of a human,
the adolescent brain of a dog
is still in development until that time.
After that time, they're adults.
And I think here the analogy
to humans is apt, right?
They can absolutely learn new things,
but sometimes they're slower
to learn new things.
Exposure to a new environment
might take multiple stages
if they're a little bit fearful
or a little bit anxious,
rather than just being able to waltz
into a new environment
and accept it, right,
because that's just the way the world is.
So ... learning happens
maybe at a much slower pace,
but absolutely happens.
And learning can happen up till
the end of their life, you know.
I think it was in the last few months
of our dog Finnegan's life,
who lived to 14.5,
that he suddenly started really
getting interested in puzzle toys,
where food is hidden
under little compartments
and you sort of have to turn a lever
to unlock the compartment
and open up the compartment.
And he encountered that at age 14, right?
He wasn't as quick at it
as he would have been as a puppy,
but he could learn that without a problem.
He took up nose work,
which is a kind of game of sniffing
and finding things by smell alone,
when he was about seven.
And he took it up,
you know, with alacrity.
So absolutely keep stimulating them.
There is research now happening
on the aging canine brain.
And like the aging human brain,
it needs a stimulation
to continue growth versus atrophy.
WPR: It sounds like also
some of the reasons
dogs maybe have been returned
has to do with this misunderstanding
about misbehavior or the things
you're suggesting here
that we just don't really understand
why dogs are behaving the way they are
and see it as perhaps
an inconvenience or challenge
instead of an opportunity to interact
with your dog differently, right?
AH: Yeah, I mean, you say challenge,
it's such a great word to use, right?
There's a huge amount that's challenging
about asking an animal to come
and live cooperatively
and neatly and tidily
and with full understanding, in your home.
And the fact of that
shouldn't be so amazing.
But I think it's still often overlooked.
And yeah, in particular,
adolescence, this time when,
oh, you thought you taught your dog,
you know, the rules of the house
or everything they need to know
for a little bit of that cooperative
cohabitation to happen
suddenly seem out the window
and your dog is just running amok
and being disobedient and so forth.
That is when most dogs
are relinquished to shelters.
The authors of a great book
on adolescence called "Wildhood"
say like, essentially,
you know, in that case,
with the case of dogs,
often adolescence is a death sentence
because if the dog misbehaves
and the person gives up the dog,
then they might wind up being euthanized
through no fault of their own,
because simply we have
too many dogs, right?
I think it really behooves us
as a society to know
a little bit more of this going in, right?
I don't want to de-romanticize
the pleasure of living with dogs,
but I want people to come in
with their eyes open,
realizing that these challenges are ahead
and on the other side of that,
and even through the challenges,
is that satisfying relationship
that they're looking for.
WPR: TED Member Gloria
is curious if dogs perceive color.
AH: Right, absolutely,
good question, Gloria,
because for a long time
it was assumed that they did not.
And that was based
on poor science, essentially.
But they can see in colors,
they have two-color vision
versus our three-color vision.
So we have cones for three different hues
and they have cones
for two different hues.
So they won't distinguish
clearly reds and oranges and yellows.
And we don't know
exactly what they'd look like,
probably a little bit
like adjoining colors.
So for instance, if you ever
go outside when it's dusk
and you notice that, like,
the colors seem muted a little bit,
our guess is that that's more or less
what their color vision is like.
But they're perfectly able to see color.
They also have great
other visual abilities,
like, they see motion much more quickly
and readily than we do.
And they see well in low light
and they see well at night.
So their eyes are really adapted
to do something a little bit different
than our three-color vision eyes are.
WPR: And then TED Member Aria is curious
why do our dogs smell our breath?
AH: Oh, it's great information about us.
And in fact ... there are now studies
using exhaled breath
to ask dogs whether they can determine
which exhale includes cancerous notes
to distinguish subjects
who have lung cancer
from those who do not.
But there is a lot
of information in your breath,
not just about ...
what you've eaten recently,
but also about your health
especially, right?
So you know, in fact, doctors,
human doctors used to use smell
as a diagnostic material much more
until about the early 20th century.
And you know, the smell of a diabetic
is especially sweet, for instance.
And so just by smelling
the breath of a patient,
could potentially get
some more information
about whatever
was concerning their patient
and dogs can smell that.
Do they know that's a diabetic? No.
But do they know if something's
different than before,
you ate something different
or maybe you're sick,
you maybe have a cold,
they might be more interested
in your breath.
I always pay attention
if my dog is particularly interested
in my even morning breath.
WPR: Interesting, wow.
It's their way of helping out.
AH: (Laughs) Yeah. If you listen to them,
they're probably saying something,
even without the overarching
knowledge of what’s behind it.
WPR: Well, sort of along those same lines,
we have an anonymous
attendee who also asks
why does their dog eat their own poop?
Is this out of curiosity,
are they doing it to get a reaction
or is there something bigger happening?
AH: There are lots of theories about this.
This is called coprofagia
and it's not uncommon.
So your dog is not doing
something wildly abnormal.
Sometimes dogs will eat feces,
their own or others',
because there is a nutrient
deficiency in their diet.
I mean, it is actually full
of nutrients still
because we and dogs
pass a lot of nutrients
that we just haven't digested.
So there might be something deficient.
Some dogs will do it to remove
evidence of their own odor.
So actually, you know,
the way that dogs will pee,
and it leaves, in an effect,
leaves their odor
and they might even pee conspicuously
on a high post or tree trunk or lamppost
in order to have their odor
smelled by other dogs.
Feces, excreta can also
be that information.
But if you, for instance,
didn't want to leave
your information in a location,
a dog might, for whatever reason --
there was another dog nearby who you
didn’t want to have an encounter with --
they might consume their feces.
If they'd been previously
punished for pooing,
maybe they would eat their feces.
But, you know, there are
lots of possibilities,
I can't tell exactly, but I would always,
always check with your vet
and see if there's anything
that they might be missing in their diet
that maybe they're trying
to make up for themselves.
WPR: Well, Alexandra, you have shared
so many really fascinating, helpful,
just great information with us
during this conversation.
And just as we're starting
to wrap up here,
is there one thing of the things
that you've shared here
that you feel like, if you take
nothing else from this conversation,
that you hope folks
will be able to use in their lives
and their relationships with their dogs?
AH: I think the hardest thing for people
to realize about their dog,
who is looking you in the eyes
and following your gaze
and walking by your side
and such a loving companion,
is that they exist in this parallel
perceptual world of smell,
which we don’t spend a lot of time in,
or even try to avoid.
And every dog who I've seen
who is allowed to live in that world
a little bit more,
sniff things they want to sniff,
intentionally go out for smell walks,
is a happier dog.
And I think the people
wind up more satisfied
in understanding what their dogs
are doing as well,
so take your dog for a smell walk.
That's my final word.
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