Why All Dogs Are Good Dogs | Alexandra Horowitz | TED

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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