64. Inside of a Dog, with Alexandra Horowitz

Alexandra Horowitz is a cognitive scientist who teaches courses like canine cognition and animal behavior at Barnard College in New York. She’s also an acclaimed author, and a sampling of her books include The Year of the Dog, Our Dogs Ourselves, The Year of the Puppy, and Inside of a dog. Suffice it to say that Alexandra knows quite a bit about dogs, and she’s an expert at sharing her knowledge. That’s why we are so excited to have her on the podcast this week.

In our conversation we travel wide ground, and discuss things like how barking is unique to dogs, why it’s a mistake to say that one dog breed is friendlier than another, how dogs have been selected to seek our attention, and the extreme subtlety of inter-dog communication. We end on a discussion of what walking with other people and listening to them observe teaches you about how to observe. 

Regardless of whether you have a dog, are a dog observer, or just a generally curious person, Alexandra Horowitz has a great deal to share.

Transcript

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[Music] Hello, thank you for joining us today on The Dog Watch, where we consider the natural world and the things that help us experience it. This podcast is like being on a ship's watch together, staring out at the ocean, thinking about the world as it goes by, and going wherever curiosity takes us. I am Michael Canfield. It is currently 12-10 at the start of the afternoon watch, and this is episode 64. Alexandra Horowitz is a cognitive scientist who teaches courses like Canine Cognition and Animal Behavior at Barnard College in New York. She is also an acclaimed author and a sampling of her books include The Year of the Dog, Our Dogs, Ourselves, The Year of the Puppy, and Inside of a Dog. Suffice it to stay that Alexandra knows quite a bit about dogs, and she is an expert at sharing her knowledge. That is why we are so excited to have her on the podcast this week. In our conversation, we travel wide ground and discuss things like how barking is unique to dogs, why it is a mistake to say that one dog breed is friendlier than another, how dogs have been selected to seek our attention, and the extreme subtlety of interdog communication. We end on a discussion of what walking with other people and listening to them observe teaches you about how to observe yourself. Regardless of whether you have a dog, or a dog observer, or are just a generally curious person, Alexandra Horowitz has a great deal to share. So let's get on to our conversation with Alexandra Horowitz. Hello, Alexandra. Thanks so much for joining us today on The Dog Watch. It's my pleasure, Mike. Thanks. So given that you teach at Barnard, I imagine we would find you today somewhere in the Upper West side, but I realize that's just my own imagination. Are you in New York, and I'm wondering if you've had any interaction with dogs so far this morning? You're exactly right. Your imagination is spot on. I am on the Upper West side about a mile from Barnard, and I just returned to my home with my little three-year-old quiddity, and I interacted with a lot of dogs in Riverside Park over the last hour. So, yeah, your imagination is ripe. So what is, can you describe your dog a little bit and attributes? Sure. She's three years old. She's a mixed breed. My breed. We got her when she was nine weeks old, so I knew her mother, and her mom was a mixed breed. Kind of cattle dog. I was trying to cattle dog. So she has a lot of cattle dog. She has some schnauser. She's sort of a scruffy, big body, 30-pound dog. She loves a tennis ball, and is a pretty sweet creature. That's wonderful. We'll talk a little bit more. I have a couple questions that relate to breed, but I have a question that relates to your teaching. As I was learning more about your background, understand you teach a course on New York and Ten Objects or have taught it periodically. I first wanted to ask you if a dog is one of those objects. Regardless of that answer, I'm kind of curious about your take on the specifics of dog culture, say dog owners, and parks and dogs themselves in New York City as you're sort of fixed there right now. That's a really big question. To the to the to the former part, New York Ten Objects is a research based nonfiction writing course, which actually has an audio component. I know I saw that. I want to take it. Yeah. It's a really fun class. I would like to take it too. And I learn a lot just by engaging it as an instructor. Certainly I was not an audio storytelling expert going in. And I've thought that for several years now, I change what the objects are these objects each year. I change what the objects are each year. You know, the objects are a lens through which someone can start to tell a story. So they're often New York typical objects, like a Harlem rent party invitation was was one of them or scaffolding on the sidewalks is another. And they can be live creatures. I think I had pigeons one year and I had street trees another year. And it's and yet it's never been a dog. And that maybe goes to your second question a little bit, which is that I am a little low to think of animals as objects, right? Yeah. Yeah. Literally true. But I, you know, I see them and really all animals at this, at this point as as their own individual people as it were. Which does make the idea of owning dogs and the fact that in New York City, we have to walk around with our dogs on leashes at least until night in the morning in the parks. We can have them off, but after nine we can have. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. It's quite, it's quite nice. But this whole relationship we have with them where they're, they're sort of objects that we pour around in the end of leashes is, I, I feel like is, is problematic to say the least. And it seems like that's an area you're delving a little bit more into in your, in your sort of research side, is that right? Yeah, absolutely more in my writing than my research, although it does, it does sort of enable me to research the, you know, the history of laws around animal welfare, animal ownership and think about what their status could and should be. And fascinating, I mean, I guess I'm sort of thinking of your research as your endeavors, you know, like writing and I would see that for you like for a podcast listener is sort of, is like your writing research activities, your thinking, I guess is something that seems to be on your mind, right? It's also interesting just as a side that this question of object that, you know, I teach biology and help, you know, students who are sort of coming to biology sort of for the first time often to, to think about biology and we use the idea of an object a lot. It's interesting because often, students think of animals, et cetera, on the emotional side, right, which you're sort of talking about or the experiential side or, but have a hard time thinking of them as an object in the sense of like subject to chemical and physical laws or whatever. And so I use the object as respect way, right, in the sense that it's interesting how when you think of an object like a molecule or an organism, a dog, et cetera, that it has these parts, it features, et cetera, but there may be also emergent properties too. So it's interesting how I respect that. Absolutely. Words are really important. Yeah, I think that's, you know, yes. And at the same time, somebody might feel that an object is something which gives it qualities and yet also allows it to be objectified as it were. Yes. And so I think that that's fascinating. I love, I love that territory. Yeah, it's interesting. And again, yes, we have to be careful, especially with an animal, right, because it's so easy for us to do that. We literally do it with many animals. And, you know, I don't know if you know how Herzog was on the podcast and talking a lot about those questions about, you know, some we eat, some we, you know, of et cetera. And it's complicated. So anyway, I understand that, you know, your main training was in cognitive science. And you're obviously widely versed in animal behavior, psychology, and have taught for years a course on canine cognition. And also just for listeners have written many scholarly popular books as well. The year the puppy, how dogs became themselves. That was just in 2022. And then our dogs ourselves being a dog inside of a dog. And then a book called on looking, which hopefully get to quite at the end. Given this, you know, I hope you'll forgive me a little bit for struggling on where to start since each of those topics I think could be like its own podcast. But I thought I'd start yet with yet another book that you edited that I didn't mention called believe it's called domestic dog cognition and behavior. And there's a section in it called looking at dogs from anthropomorphism to animal, um, built. So I thought it might be fun to sort of ask you to start us off by describing like what is that range from anthropomorphism to animal, um, built for someone coming to it. Like what do those kind of words mean? Because I think that they're they can kind of help describe where where your thinking has been or what your questions are. That's true. Yeah. Sure. Be happy to the anthropomorphisms are these natural, normal attributions that we make to non humans, um, including non human animals, but also extending to. In an of human characteristics, and this goes way back thousands of years to attributions to the clouds or a weather of being vengeful or angry, um, and talking about, for instance, a rock's behavior in falling off a cliff as being willful in some way as opposed to being caused by gravity. And it's a type of explanation that we do of the natural world, including animals where we give them human attributes. We assume they sort of want things that we want and have the feelings we have and maybe even think things that we think. And in my field and in all animal behavior science, certainly there's a real caution about anthropomorphism of our subjects, non human animals, because the worry is that instead of really seeing what they're doing. There are actual behavior that we can describe. Quasa objectively, where presumptively putting on them the feelings and motivations that we would have. So it's for a long time been considered just an erroneous thing to do, right? Anthropomorphic. And so, the erroneous do not imagine that the rest of the world is just like humans. And it's a some extent, I think in behavioral science, we've started to change our mind a little bit about it and pulled back and said, listen, you know, there might be a place for anthropomorphisms. I think there's a place for anthropisms in generating hypotheses about things that you can then test, for instance. But it's been the kind of cautionary note about giving too much to creatures who might not have it. I think that's what was implied. And on the other side is this idea of Umfeld, which I think my field has really embraced now, which was an idea first introduced by Jakob Bonooskul, who was an Austrian scientist about a century ago. Exactly the opposite, the inner world of the animal. But his special observation was that the inner world of the animal isn't going to be made up of important to us and the types of sensory percepts that we experience. But instead it's going to be their own little world, their own sense bubble where, for instance, my subject dogs who are so strongly olfactory, they are going to read a scene with a strong olfactory component. They're noticing the smells of a room, not just how the room looks. And they also are noticing objects and applying meaning to them that have meaning in the dog world that they can act on. Some like desk here covered with books and papers and pens and so forth. Most of that is not really meaningful for a dog. It doesn't mean that they can't see it or smell it certainly, but that it doesn't have the same meaning that it has for me. And so he was giving scientists really a different way to think about the internal life of the dog or any animal that's not anthropomorphic and also very importantly gives them the possibility of a rich internal life. So would you say that I mean, in thinking about our interactions with dogs and that's kind of where we're going, right? Like that's the fun of this conversation in many ways that you've studied dogs and a scientific way of experiments, etc. had also personal experiences with this. You're helping us understand how we can think about it. It seems like we have our own built, right? Where we are an animal in our own world. We have sensory perceptions, etc. and signals and cues that we're both giving and receiving. And we then also have cognition where we're applying those thoughts on other animals be it a dog. The dog also has its own, um, where it's in its own world, thinking about things and doing things on its own and also giving cues and receiving cues. So that's kind of the, that's the terrain. Would that be a fair sort of description and if not are there other pieces we should think about as we kind of put the, put the rules of the road in as far as how we interact with our dogs. I think the only other piece is that, you know, there are individual umfels as well, which wherein my own developmental story, what I've been exposed to, what I've experienced, um, will shape what I continue to notice and experience, right? And what salient to me in the world and similarly for every individual dog. So you have also, so there's always going to be something a little idiosyncratic individual to individual. Yeah, excellent. I'm going to ask a couple questions about this, some of the specifics of the sensory aspects of the umbilth of animals, because I think that's something that you've really written about and explained in incredible ways. I wanted to ask first though, there are many stories that humans tell about why dogs do certain things. You know, these may be about their own dogs or dogs in general, like my dog, you know, I come home and it kisses me because it loves me or whatever it might be. It kind of gets to some of these what versus why questions that are obviously important in biology where we could describe that the dog licks you when it comes home and then we try to add a story on to why that takes place. I'm curious if there are any, like, I mentioned this sort of licking one, but if there is a set of these kinds of, I would say anthropomorphic misconceptions or stories that come up with you and your students, like that come up over and over again that are sort of part of the canon of these either misconceptions or just the stories we tell about umbilth that really need to be explored. I mean, that's a great one to begin. I hear that all the time, right? Dog kisses is sort of a sort of a question. You know, you've talked about it just to be fair. And also things like another thing that I've written about, the guilty look of dogs is appreciating and are feeling the kind of guilt that we would feel if we misbehaved as we believe they have that type of thing. And that comes up a lot. There's also a lot of conversation about a dog feeling, you know, various other types of emotions in typical settings. So jealous in various settings. It's a very useful, right? Some of the behaviors often described as that. So these are also consoling even, right? That a dog who comes up to when you're upset or crying. Oh, don't take that away from me. I'm not taking any of these things away. I'm joking. I just think they need to be kind of interrogated, right? And absolutely, you know, just to go into it for a second. The kisses one, for instance. There's a whole, I think, important story we can tell about the fact that that's maybe a vestigial behavior from their wolfie ancestry where wolves kiss each other all over the face when they return to the pack. And it kind of encourages the hunting wolves to regurgitate some of the food that they've collected for the others to eat, right? That that could be part of what they're doing. But it is also clearly a greeting, right? So it's not just, it's not diminished by having this fuller explanation, right? I think it's sort of enriched. And so even with the things like the consoling where I think that the behavior is a little different than people might, you know, I want to explore it empirically, not just, not just anthropomorically shut it down, right? Like it is also an anthropomorphism to assume that like we're special. It's really another percentrism. And we, and then know all other emotion like behaviors in other animals must be, um, must be our imagination. Absolutely not. I think that's ridiculous as well. So it's just looking at them and saying like, what's our, what's our basis for, for making those types of claims? Yeah. And you know, kind of joking, obviously joking a little bit about not taking it away from me. I think that somehow sometimes what people feel, right? But those features like is mentioned consoling even anger, etc. when we have to be careful about the stories we tell because, you know, partly I think with, with anger and aggression, etc. It might be fear. And so in trying to figure out how to help a dog or interact with a dog, that might be important. However, like whether they're really kissing, you know, kissing you partly to taste what they can taste or get some salt. Maybe it's okay, you know, like, but clearly part of it's about the interaction too. And in our um, maybe it's okay if we have a, you know, we attribute some of that to love whatever that means for a dog. So, um, I want to get to some of the things you've written about and thought about your knowledge of these, some of the sensory channels, right? Because clearly dogs in their own will think about things or receive things a little bit differently than we do. Talk about that anatomy of a sniff. I love that sort of idea. And I wonder if you could just sort of describe like, what is the anatomy of a sniff? What do you mean when you talk about that? What I love is that a sniff can be examined more closely, right? It's something that humans don't think about that much. So, you know, if you think about the old faction is just at what it is, it's just volatile organic compounds, molecules that are coming into the nose and maybe bind to a receptor, the back of the nose, to get in back of the nose, one has to inhale, right? So, that's the beginning of a sniff and you have to inhale strongly enough in fact so that the odor gets back there. It's like a, you know, a wallet is a chemical interaction at some level. It's also has this mechanical component, which is just the air has to get to the tissue that has the olfactory receptor cells. So, inhaling is like that. We know that as humans, if we don't like a smell that's in our nose, we can just exhale strongly and potentially get that smell out, right? That's a way to clear the nose somewhat. But for dogs who are, I think primarily olfactory, at least like extraordinarily olfactory, especially with respect to us, they don't want to get those smells out, right? It's like, if it's how they're seeing the world, they don't want to be blinking every time they need to exhale and suddenly not seeing the world. So, it turns out that they anatomically have a mechanism to kind of induce a sort of circular breathing. They exhale out the sides, let's have their nose, so that the air coming in is not disturbed, so that they're not interrupting that channel of sniffing in. And it's beautiful to see, I mean, the people who do this flow dynamics show the visualization of the air coming out the sides. And then if a nose is very close to the ground, as it often is, it literally stirs up more odor from the ground, which can then be sniffed in. So, it sort of self-perpetuates the process as well. It's really gorgeous to see in the type of thing that I think our imaginations would circumscribe if we just anthropomorphize to the dog. What do you mean by that? Like, would circumscribe? We wouldn't see that. We wouldn't imagine that another animal lives in a smelling world. Like, Donald Griffiths somehow had the imagination to see that bats who have eyes and ears are not using their eyes and ears in the way that we use our eyes and ears exactly right, and are navigating it completely different way. I mean, that's perception of umphel right there, and it's just not intuitive for most of us to imagine that. I think, I don't know what that animal is doing. What we tend to do is say something like, oh, it must be psychic. Right? Like, it must, it has some sixth sense. No, no, no, no. I mean, there are plenty of other senses that humans just don't have. So, imagination doesn't go there in our attributions. It's funny, like you mentioned, Don, Griffith, like, to be around someone like that or to see them think about how those animals and sort of enact that questioning. I remember when he was looking at beavers, I don't know if you know, late, very late, he was, you know, stuffing stuff down into beaver lodges and stuff and trying to figure out, you know, how they exist in their world. I think that applies to dogs, and that's the mindset I think you're talking about is if you look at a dog, you know, thinking this morning in anticipation or conversation, I had my dogs, I take them to a dog park. And I'm like, there's nothing that come on, you know, like, I've got to get ready, I've got to get everybody's cool. And they're thinking, like, there's all these smells, right? That there, yeah, there's all sorts of stuff there that I'm not seeing that is sort of on the laminar surface. It's just outside my comprehension, but like you said, they're doing this anatomy of a sniff. Their noses are fundamentally structured in a different way to take advantage of it. I think it's just really fascinating. So, you know, with this sort of anatomy of sniff, one of the things that you've talked about a little bit is this question of the chemicals that they're sniffing, right? I think that's the way the park, not to be overly blunt, but like the things that they're sniffing are often things that came from other dogs, right? And urine, et cetera. You've talked about this sort of plant, the flag hypothesis versus a conversation hypothesis. I thought that might be a nice way to kind of exemplify some of the things that you're talking about, that when we try to make these explanations of their umbil, we've told a story about dogs pee on the fire hydrant to mark their territory. And I'm curious if you could just briefly kind of explain, like is that true? Is that the way to think about it or not? Because again, I know you've written about that as well. Yeah, that idea sort of territorial marking comes from sort of a quasi-biological place even. So it's an interesting thing because sometimes when we try to explain behavior, we just look at related species behaviors, especially with domestic animals, we say, well, what's the non-domestic relative doing? And in this case, dog share common ancestor with wolves. And so we look at wolf behavior and say, well, oh, so whatever the wolf is doing, must be what the dog is doing. And there's some good reason to do that, right? And wolves do mark territoryally. They will leave scent markings to be clear communications to other wolves who are not in their pack to not cross this line. And they sniff for other wolf's markings. So it looks like dogs might be doing that except for the fact that they're not marking, there isn't a territory that they are literally marking, right? I mean, I hope most dogs aren't going around the perimeter of your house and urinating all around the perimeter of your house. And that would we would think be roughly their territory. So they might have lost some of that specific territorial intent in the marking. And yet, it still serves the same kind of communicative function that it might have for the wolves. So it must for the wolf still, which is that it's information about another dog that you're sniffing on that fire hydrant or that your information about yourself, that you're leaving for potential other dogs that you put on that tree trunk. So it's still communicative. And that's what dogs are doing when they're sniffing other dogs urine is seeing who's been there. And there's also some information in that urine about really who it is. There's sex certainly there probably something about their health and what they've eaten and certainly their reproductive status. So and who knows what else, you know, I would love to understand the olfactory percept there, but at minimum, we know there are those types of information in urine. It's interesting that like in framing this question of a conversation in my own experience watching my dogs like when I read that and sort of thought about it from that perspective, you watch a dog go over and I have female dogs and they, you know, come on, let's go, let's go. And they just kind of run over and they're sniffing around and then they're like, no, no, wait, I just have to pee a little bit. I got to tell them I hear, you know, like I've got to say, I've been here. That seems to actually make more sense than like I'm marking this territory because that's not a place they've been or that they're going to be or they're not clearly trying to defend it or anything else. So it's interesting how when we I in this case come up with a different perspective on their own belt and introduce this idea, you can change your story. You tell, not I guess what you're saying is that we don't have a lot of evidence whether like what that conversation would be. But as we try these different explanations on you can see that, oh, wait a minute, maybe that one would make more sense actually and I could see how experimenting on it would be, but be really fun. But yeah, and it fits better with their behavior, you know, I mean, one of the things would, and you start to see things differently. If you don't start with the, with a kind of perfunctory explanation and for instance, one of the things that we saw when we put, we just put a post out in the park and monitored it, monitored use of this post by dogs. That's awesome. I don't know if that's funny. But it was one of the things that would happen is dogs would sniff it and then put their heads up and either look or sniff for the dog, I assume, who left that mark, right. They're seeing it as somebody as a representation of somebody and maybe, and maybe they even have a kind of a dress book of dogs who are in the neighborhood or certainly maybe they know their dogs with whom they're familiar. And if you, if they smell them, they expect to be able to find them visually or by following their scent on the air. And so then their behavior looks really different. It doesn't look like they're just going around just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, peeing, you know, wherever they want to claim territory, but they're using it as a way to like find their friends. Or smell that really interesting dog who's new to the neighborhood or something like that. So I, the behavior is changed when you, when you change an understanding of what the sniffing is. Yeah, it's fascinating. But another sense, obviously you talk about is sort of the question of visual sense and sight. And I was really interested in wanted to ask you about obviously dogs are dichromats. We think of them as colorblind, but again, there's an anthropomorphism there. But this question of vision and how there's sort of a difference in flicker rate and the way that those receptors are distributed sort of peripherally or centrally. I'm curious you could sort of help people understand like how is the visual and felt different. What are the principles that we would want to make sure when we look at a dog, we're like, wait a minute, they're actually seeing things a little bit differently. And it's not necessarily more basal. I mean, they are more basal in some sense. They're not as well. That's a different question evolutionarily, but I mean, obviously we would often say, well, they be dichromats because they're not as great as we are. But that probably isn't the best way framework. So I wonder if you could kind of help us think about the visual of a dog. Sure. Yeah, those are that's great observation that their visual sense like the effect resents was probably evolved to fit the niche that they were in. And if you look at wolves, they are mostly not turn. So their vision is going to be more adapted to seeing at night. And as a result, dogs have like wolves, not amazing color sense, but instead any more raw, photo receptors, which allow them to see black and white to allow them to see motion. And also a lot better peripheral vision. So they're seeing over a wide range, wider range than we are. And they can see in in low light, right. They also have the tepid and lucidum, which is just another set of tissues that allows a kind of the light to be reflected back again to sort of add more light to the retina in low light conditions. And that's why you get that red eyes in your dog. At least we used to when we were using like flash cameras. And a fly eye shine and night. Yeah. Yes. Flashly. Exactly. Which we recognized in pictures that we take of all doctoral animals, right, that we see at night. So that's actually very common. It's much more common than the particular three color vision that we have, I think, in among animals. And then Paul McRevy and his colleagues found this sort of interesting distribution of cells. Humans are very centrally, most of our cells in our eyes are centrally located in the phobia. The phobia is just an area of high concentration of visual cells, enabling us to see things best that are right in front of us, right. Like the face that's right in front of us. The now the computer screen that's right in front of us, whatever it is. We can also see in the periphery, but everybody knows it's a little less clear. And if you really want to see something to your side, you turn and look at it because that's where we have this concentration of cells. So McRevy, Paul McRevy found that dogs with different shaped noses, dogs who've been bred in other words to either be breaking cephalic, which is just a really short skull, short, short nose like a pug or a bulldog. Had different distribution of cells in their eyes than the long nose dog, Dolikosa phallic dogs, like a gray hound or even like the golden retriever or a labrador. So the long nose dogs who are known for things like retrieving things have a stronger concentration of visual cells in a band that goes horizontally the width of the eye. And that presumably enables them to do things like notice something moving across the horizon, right, which is the behavior which jibes really nicely with the behavior we see of chasing things that go across the horizon. And these brackets of phallic dogs, which we have bred probably to have a more human like appearance in their face with their shorter nose and their big eyes and broad foreheads. Actually have something that's more like a phobia, it's like a concentration of cells they call it the area centralis, which allows them to basically sit in your lap and gaze at your gaze at your face the way we kind of appreciate that some dogs do with us. So here again, something about their sensory just organization gives us a better understanding of their behavior. That's fascinating. It leads really into kind of another question I have, which is about breeding. Obviously the new mentioned wolves. We've taken a gray wolf and over many thousands of years changed it in lots of different directions through the process of artificial selection or really domestication. That example that you just brought up, it's fascinating because if you select for a snout, it's possible that or certain attributes that change the snout that the eyes also change and how those change separately or together is a question. But we've changed lots of things that affect how the dog exists in its world, right, it's like its tools. So I have a couple questions about that, which I've really been hoping to puzzle with you about and learn from you. So the first is, you know, you talk a little bit about how domestication changed the dogs and physical features. You talked about the bark and the differences in barks between dogs and wolves, right, that's, you know, something that's, we've talked about the receiving end of some of the aspects, but the giving or the sound producer or signal producer aside. So why was domestication important and how did it affect how dogs communicate through their vocalizations? You know, wolves do not bark, typically they don't bark at all. They make a lot of types of vocalizations, how's, crowds, you know, chattering, lines, yelps that we do here in dogs. But over the course of selection over the thousands of years at some point, we selected for dogs who made something like a barking sound. And that presumably, and this is just presumably because there's no way to test it, had to do with the fact initially that dogs who made noise when there was somebody hovering at the edge of our camp were effective guard dogs, right, alerted us to the intrusion of somebody or predator. That we needed to know about. Now we have dogs who are barking who are not guard dogs and it appears that they're barking as a way to communicate with us essentially, right. We have selected for it and some of something in our story of domestication has enabled the fact that we breed dogs who bark, they bark in a frequency which is the same as human speech. So it could be that it could be, and this is just just a story, I don't know, but it could be that they're really sort of trying to, you know, send back to us what we're sending to them. And yet, what's so tragic about it is that barks are really seen as just annoying by most people and certain and a barking dog in a city, for instance, you know, could get you evicted from your apartment. And we're not that great at distinguishing between different barks that even realize that there are different types of barks that have different types of meanings. So it's all been for not. But it's fascinating that the bark really is, in some ways, unique to dogs, right, it's something that came out and it is theirs, right, rather than being a wolf or whatever that it's really an aspect of that. It's definitely not a wolf. There are, I think there are other animals who have bark-like sounds, right, they're in, you know, who are in the broader set of carnivores. But in dogs, we really, it's like a hypertrophic behavior. We've really, really selected for it. Yeah, and it's convergent, then, right? We don't even want it. Yes, absolutely. A convergence to other things, but that we brought out. I wanted to ask you another question. I'm not sure how much you've thought about it, but I really am curious. So my understanding is, you know, since there's been some recent papers out on temperament and dogs and related to what you're saying about the individual variation within a breed, for example, and then differences between breeds of dogs. I think that when people did some of these experiments on foxes, et cetera, like domesticating foxes, my understanding is that when you select for docility or sort of more even temperament or easy temperament, so to speak, other things go along with that, like physical characteristics, et cetera. So I'm curious about obviously with dogs and creating breeds, right, and selecting for different breeds for highs, you know, tall dogs, short dogs, different types of hair, et cetera. We've obviously changed them pretty fundamentally. I know those characteristics are relatively laid by evolutionarily, but they look really different. So I wouldn't you imagine that there would be behavioral things that would also vary consistently between breeds? Well, in fact, there are some types of behavioral things that vary consistently between breeds, but they're not the types of behaviors that were thinking about, I think. So they're more like tendencies than they are behaviors on the human scale. So I can't say one breed is like just always friendly or then another breed, I think that's wrong to say, and people shouldn't say that. However, there definitely are breeds that are, for instance, seem to be more strongly motivated to do something we would call work, right, to be engaged in activity through a whole day than other breeds. So that would lead to lots of different types of behaviors, it might lead to a lot of misbehavior, if you have a dog who's really active and has a strong work drive, it doesn't have anything to do. I think it's something a little bit more fundamental, which is just that they are really motivated to be active and sort of need something to do a project is the way we'd put it in human terms, and other dogs are not as much like that. So there are those types of behavioral differences that do accompany breeding. And again, not trying to, like obviously this leads down this road, right, of conversations around aggression about some dogs are nice, or some breeds are nice, some are nasty or whatever, right. But I mean, I think that's not where I'm trying to go, but it's also curious to me, like wouldn't response to fear, right, or something like that, or how quickly an animal or a breed in a work environment, right, responsive to fear that certain of those behaviors would also potentially be accentuated in certain breeds or not. You know what I mean? Like that could happen, and we should be looking for those things is not that breeds don't mean anything with respect to behavior. I guess that's what I'm wondering about. Yes, exactly they mean nothing, right, but as you say, right, it's wrong to say that the behavior we're thinking of, the sort of aggressive behavior is something that's built in, but we might have a dog who is more independent or less responsive to humans, for instance, right, versus, so there are breeds who are more independent. And you can imagine that certain types of interactions or situations that they're put in might be difficult for those dogs, and they might react with normal dog communications that I don't like that and humans is usually ignore it, and then they up the ante and it suddenly seemed aggressive. So, you know, I think you have to really unpack those things and just look at like really more fundamental behavioral differences that could lead to the things that we want to talk about, like the aggressive dog, the friendly dog, the good with children dog, et cetera. And I think that's interesting because the extent to which dogs experience is biased by their owners and their experience, I think is partly what you're mentioning is very significant, right? You know, I mean, you just think about the way that, I don't know, clever Hans and things like how we, you know, coach our animals, et cetera, those things are really fundamental. And then to try to tell a story about, you know, what, what these animals are like in a breed, we've really gotten ourselves into the problem. And I'm not arguing one way or the other. I mean, obviously there are issues that we have to deal with with dogs, right, in different contexts, but it's to go at it from a breed perspective is is only one aspect of trying to understand what these dogs are experiencing. I mean, I think the other piece to that very thorny question is some dogs have been bred to have certain musculature or whatever so that if they do get aggressive, the consequences are different than, I mean, one just snouts eyes, if you have a bigger mouth, right? Like you can do might do more damage, right? Or whatever. So anyway, I don't want to go down that route too far, but I think we do have to be careful. And that's helpful for you clarifying kind of how we should think about breeds and the kind of. We should think about breeds and behavior and how we mean we really shouldn't in the sense of what's not supported by the data. Yeah, and I will say just one more thing on this. Well, two quick things is one is James Surtbeau who developed this, this sea bark, this sort of large scale survey of that enables them to try to associate breeds with different behaviors. And so I think that the reason that the dog found that the reported most aggressive dog is the doxand and the reason maybe we aren't concerned about the doxand perceived aggressiveness to other dogs are people is because they're very little, right? So there's nothing about the, and yeah, so it's a combination of who they are and how we see the, and you know, now the people is the is the dog that some people love to blame. There are plenty of extremely doxled people and in a different time in history, it was the rotwiler, it was the German shepherd, it was the doberman. And in the early in the 19th century, it was a tiny little pomeranian like dog. It's, you know, it's, it's very culturally relative, which should also make us question the kinds of assignments we're making to specific breeds. Right, exactly. I mean, if you're a rat, I guess the, the dog's one is the most dangerous dog. Absolutely, rats had done that survey. They wouldn't be laughing about that conclusion. Yes. They would be really scared. So, okay, another question for you as a sort of behaviorist, if you will, or behavioral biologist psychologist, there are a lot of people who train dogs, right? Individuals try to train with treats, et cetera. There are trainers who do all manner of things. I'm curious, like when you look at dog training, what do you see? For example, I mean, someone who's just a sort of casual observer, podcast listener might remember sort of this idea of operant conditioning, maybe a remember Pavlov from an intro site course and sort of classical conditioning. But what is dog training, right? Is it pretty simple? Is it does it boil down to a really simple sort of psychological principle? Or is it a really big range of sort of tricks and techniques that are used to exploit different aspects of conditioning, et cetera? Great question. I mean, there is a very wide range of types of things that count as training and you don't, there's really, although there begins to be like a kind of uniform certification process, lots of people are out there who call themselves trainers who were just people who are calling themselves putting out a single same trainer. So since that's in our world of trainers, like it's, it's a really broad range of tools that are used, but they do all boil down to some level of conditioning, right? Either you're rewarding the things you like or you're saying that I want to punish the things I don't like. And those are two different styles of trainers who predominate ones who kind of think you need to use punishment and the ones who want to reward behaviors you want to encourage. And the difference, so I, you know, I really find the people who are using punishment, they just don't understand learning theory, right? They don't understand that that's not effective. And I also think they don't understand the point of the training, which is to build in my mind a better relationship with the dog, not to kind of dominate your dog. But within even the people who do positive reinforcement training, it's all, you know, normal conditioning. There are people who are really, really creative about how you can do that, right? And then there are people who are just just applying the, the basic sound ideas of rewarding behavior you like and ignoring behavior you don't. So there is enormous range. Unfortunately, there's no way to talk about like one trainer who is like all of them. And, and another component, I think also of the very good trainers is that they really see their task as training the person to understand their dog's behavior, to see their dog's behavior in a slightly different way so that they can respond to it in a way that the dog will understand. And, you know, people who know it's now very popular to, for instance, send a dog to like sort of a boot camp where they get trained for a month with expert trainers and then they return to their household. And while I think it's great if the dog has a great month with somebody who sort of appreciates them and understands them and is responsive to them. If they just return to the same household, it's not going to work, right? This training isn't like a thing you put on the dog training is having a relationship with people communicate with the dog and the dog learns to communicate with the person so that they're mutually, they're in a conversation. So, there's a wide range. I, as you say though, am not a trainer and I don't even really do that much training with my dog, right? I just sort of assume there's some things I will explicitly trained, but mostly I just kind of try to make our world clear and clear to them and also try to see what they're doing and what they need. Yeah, and I mean, to your point, I think to reinforce that kind of training and those, those that conditioning is a lot of work and it has to happen constantly basically. Yes. And so, I think often owners that the benefit isn't really necessary, right? The time is better spent in developing them the relationship in different ways. So, would it be all operant conditioning though, basically? Yes. Okay, that's what I was thinking. So, basically what we're doing, regardless of how you train, whether you go to boot camp or whatever, there's an element of operant conditioning that's being acted on, a reward for a fact-tated behavior that they're doing. Yes. As opposed to Pavlov, that was like when it was an involuntary behavior or something, right? Or isn't that right? Yes, but it's still conditioning, still pairing of a behavior with a response or stimulus with a response, right? Yep. And so, that's what we're doing. We're pairing something the dog does, giving a reward, pairing the stimulus and response and rewarding something that we want. And really all of those things, boiled down to that is just how you execute on it. Yes. And as you say, also doing it consistently, which is something that we as owners are not great at. Right. And I think that gets back to what you kind of started with today, which was sort of like what do you think about sort of ownership and the strangeness of the fact that we can, you know, by the end of this conversation, I could have bought another dog, have a dog, arrive at my house. You know, on a jet plane from somewhere else. And then suddenly I have this whole other sentient being like a product. If I treat them like a product, I'm maybe not thinking that I have to continually reward and have a conversation with this product in order for it to function in the way I want it to function. So there's some, there's a real dissonance in our current society about how we can acquire dogs and what we think of them and then how we interact with them in order to make them part of our family. Yeah. And not to overly analyze, but that's where, you know, when you describe it that way, thinking of a dog as an object isn't helpful because an object you think like, well, you have to feed it. It's got to have these chemicals going in and out like that's a functional thing, but what you're describing is that the regular interaction and conversation, we're not, that's not a construct that we think of with objects, right? That's where a different construct is helpful to understand that part of a dog. Yes. And by the time I opened my computer, I had to like, recode some of the software. It would be ridiculous. It would be insane. Because your computer doesn't have its own life where it's like, you know, doing stuff at night or whatever. I don't know what dogs do at night, but attention is this other idea that I just find so beautiful and fascinating, right? How the question of attention to humans is unique as well, just like a bark, right? So what can you tell us about that? I know that that could be again, that could be a whole podcast, but I think people will be really fascinated if they haven't explored that to just understand how that element of being a dog and a human, right? It's not just about the dog, it's about the humans affecting dogs over thousands of years, but also now that interaction is so much about an attention question. Yeah. And what you can get from that attention. So the, one of the things that we've selected for in domestication is dogs who will look at us in the face. And this seems like a very simple mechanism and is also very familiar. You know, you know, people who live with dogs are accustomed to having their dog look at them. In fact, I'll hear people on the street say to their dogs, look at me, right? Like they, like they would to a child because we, because of what is actually really important about looking at the face is it implies attention and with attention, you can communicate. There's understanding behind attention and the thing that we changed about dogs from wolves is that dogs do not look at, I mean, do not look at yourself. You should not look at a wolf in the face. You should not stare at a wolf because mutual gaze is a threat behavior in wolf society. That's a way you try to avoid a conflict by staring someone down. And in fact, in human society, we could do that as well, right? With someone who you don't know in a certain aggressive stare, but that's very common throughout the animal kingdom that gazing at someone in the face is considered a threat. But dogs, for some reason, we figured out the mechanism to select for dogs who didn't feel that threat when we gaze at them and in fact want to gaze at us. And so we are able to share a gaze with dogs, which allows us to have their attention, which allows them to understand a little bit of our attention. And then without attention, we can start to communicate with them. We can use turning of our head to indicate where something is. They can follow our points as Brian Hare discovered years ago. In a way that other non-humans, including primates, don't understand. They don't see that when I point at something, it means I'm indicating something over there that I want to show you or I want you to go get. But dogs do understand that. And that's because they started looking at us, right? And we could share that attention between us. And so is that true for non-human primates too as far as the stare and attention? Yes, yes. So they don't do that. I mean, a stare, gazing at each other's face, sitting at gazing at each other's face, they don't do that. That's amazing, isn't it? Wow. I have a few more things I mean, again, I could go on forever, but I have this issue that Lily, one of my dogs, I have two yellow labs. And Lily is pretty sneaky. And this gets to this question that you talk about. And I think if you talk a course on theory of mind in the past. So she does a few things. What? When I'm making hot dogs for my kids, she smells the buns and she's a, she's a carb dog, right? She loves the smell of bread. And so she'll, I swear, she plans ahead, she smells it, but she doesn't go right at it. She is like lurking around the corner, et cetera. And then when I go like turn to the pan to make the dogs, she comes in and goes after those hot dog buns up on the top, right? So she's sort of planning the other thing she does, which she did again last night was the other dog pepper is a little bit younger. Pepper, we were, my son plays hockey, we were watching a hockey game and et cetera. And so I sat down next to pepper on the ground and just pet her a little bit. Lily, I could see she went over around the, around the chair to the, the, the pie of the bin of toys. She pulls out a toy, goes over and starts playing with it. Knowing that pepper will come over and play with toy. And as soon as pepper comes over to play with toy, she comes over and sits next to me to get me to rubber belly. Right. She does that constantly like to the point where like not constantly, but like I feel like that's an observable behavior when I'm like, how if peppers up on the couch, she'll go get a toy play with it and wait for, you know, pepper will just jump down because peppers when she's not that smart, but like she's like, oh, great, a toy and then Lily hops up. So to me, I can't resist partly because I love Lily so much. And I think a lot of her applying all sorts of things to that. Like Lily has this high level of intelligence, right? She's planning ahead. She's doping pepper, et cetera. But I'm coming to you trying to say like, what, what can I attribute to that? Right. And what can't I? Yeah. Those are great examples. And I hear about examples like that from time to time and they're very compelling. They do, it seems to me, first of all, that she is exhibiting planning. And she is exhibiting an understanding of your attention. So if she waits till you turn your back, that's because, and there've been studies on this, like dogs see the difference between your back being turned and you standing there looking at them. Or you being out of the room or you're being involved in a reading a book or watching television, right? They see the attentional differences. And that's because this is their profession, right? Like studying us is what they have to do most of the day. And they get really good at noticing the difference between my getting up to go to the fridge or my getting up and potentially going for a walk. Right. And that those sometimes things that we don't feel like we're doing differently to them are big differences. And it's because we do them again and again and they're observing us. So is she noticing your attention? Is she planning? Yes. Is she trying to get a pepper off the couch? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Now, would I be able to say as a scientist, she's showing a theory of mine, she's thinking this something like this. If I squeeze this toy, then pepper will think that I want to play with her and so she'll come over here and then I can rush up to that coveted spot. I don't know that she's thinking that, right? First of all, we don't know. And that's because it's just hard to prove. That doesn't mean she's not. But I just think it's hard to prove that. And here's another way to think about it. How many times does she do something which doesn't effectively get pepper off the couch? Like does she do other things potentially which are less successful at getting pepper off the couch? Does she do that? And sometimes it doesn't work. You know, we don't notice the times that she's not exhibiting what looks like a theory of mine. So that's an, that just shows how the, that's just a way of thinking about how an anecdote is very compelling and really is a way that we start designing experiments, right? But that it's not conclusive by itself. And it's also, for me to say, it's not conclusive is not to say that I think the opposite either, right? That's the sort of way people think about science like, oh, you think that my dog, you think that jealous is not the opposite. You think that my dog, you think that jealous, that that doesn't maybe imply jealousy, for instance, that must mean that you think dogs can't be jealous. No, I absolutely don't. I just say, I'm just saying, you know, our bias in looking at where our attention is is we notice positive examples much more than we notice the negative examples of a cognitive faculty when it comes to our dogs. I'm certainly biased by my deep love for my puppies and I, and the other thing is that I've tried to apply a more sensible or sort of unbiased perspective. And yes, it does seem like she may have just learned that like, okay, if this happens, if peppers with me, if I go here and do this, then I get what I want, right? I'm kind of going through a lot of, you know, more emotional or sort of, I don't know, devious pieces like it's not being devious necessarily or tricking her exactly she's not thinking I'm going to trick pepper. It's just that I do this. So that's possible. But the other things that the way that she looks when she does it, like the actual behaviors, which may or may not have anything to do with, but she does seem like she's slinking. It's like we, I can't help, but like the ears are kind of down. She's low to the ground and she's even the way she jumps up on the couch seems like she's like trying to be a little bit devious. Very sneaky. Well, you know, to be fair, also, we learn theory of mind, for instance, as humans, it's not like we, I mean, we might come inbuilt with a tendency or to be able to think about this kind of complicated attributions about other people's mental states. But we don't, it doesn't come on automatically if we didn't interact with other people, we wouldn't exhibit it. It's, we learn it through examples and then we're able to generalize it. So what I'd be interested in is does she also think of the way that in a novel situation, she could maybe manipulate something in order to get the attention back from you or the coveted spot back from pepper. Right? That would be a little bit more of an example of an idea that she had generalized this sort of like, oh, yeah, I need to manipulate pepper's attention or whatever to get to that spot or to get your attention in a new place with using a new mechanism. That would look more theory of mind, more conclusively theory of mindish. All right. I've got to think of some experiments. I'll work on that. This is what it's all about. This is what my whole field is about thinking like that. It's fun. It is awesome. And just as what is a theory of mind, just for people who we've been talking about, I realize I didn't ask you to sort of just say, what are we talking about? Yeah, it's theory of mind is the ability to understand that others have mental states, their thoughts and desires and feelings that are different than yours. And they were attributing to others basically their own thoughts, their own mindset. And it's something that human children learn. Maybe as early as something like 18 months, they're showing examples of it. Maybe more like robustly by about three or four years old, they're realizing that, you know, if they go into the kitchen and stick their hand in the cookie jar. And if the parent is right there, the parent is going to see them and they have to wait until the parent is out of the kitchen if they want to go and steal that cookie because they realize that she won't know something that's happening right now because she has her own knowledge state and space in her perception. And the question is with a dog, like, how does that apply? Right, like with more dog and another, are they really doing that or are they existing in the world differently than that sort of theory of mind, which is fascinating. And it sounds like there's a lot of open questions there. Yes. Well, I have two more things. Super generous of you time. But I wanted to ask you about this play signals, like clearly you spent a lot of time watching dogs play like early on in your work. You just sort of watch dog plays recorded them and then I found a fascinating talked about slowing them down, right, and watching it almost frame by frame. So what would one learn and what did you learn when you watch dogs play, but actually when you watch them, but then slow it down, watch it really slowly. Like what are the things that you that emerge from that process? We view play as just a monolithic activity, you know, I see dogs playing, you're like, oh, they're playing, right, but of course there's more to it than that. And the way we, I, the only way I could understand the behaviors that are happening in this very high, high-paced kind of dance between two dogs is to slow down the videotape. And that just enables me to look at the behaviors in the way that you're describing lilies behaviors, right, first this happens, then this happens, then this other thing happens, right, going back and forth between you and lily. And I had to look at the video frame by frame, a 30th of a second at time to see the things that are relevant to making play work between dogs. And in particular, I was looking at communications, play signals that start a game of play or continue a game of play when it's paused, that frame all the other behaviors and seem to say something like, you know, everything I do after this is is pretend. So I'm about to bite you, but it's a pretend bite, it's not a real bite, so don't react aggressively or defensively. And also I was looking at attention, so just as you were describing like then my back is turned, I have to look, I had to look at the video extreme slow motion to see if these communications were happening when the dog that they were playing with was attending to them, or if they were turning the other way, or if they were interacting with another dog, and just like tiny little turns of the head are important intentional differences. I just couldn't see it at the pace at which I watch play. So when you slow it down, you really do see how they're using their attention importantly in communication, and they even if the someone if a dog wants to play with another dog, and that second dog's attention is somewhere else they're engaged with a person. The dog who wants to play has to really work hard to get their attention do sort of more extreme attention getters than if the dog is just has their head turned to the side in which case you can kind of just like wave in front of them and say hey, want to play right and they were doing these behaviors with with real sensitivity to the state of attention or the state of in attention of their playmates. So that's when I saw when I slowed it down. So just so I understand like if one dog comes up to another and bites it on the leg, right, and I don't mean like aggressively bites it, but it's like I'm going to play with you, I'm going to this play is this bite is going to be kind of fake, everything after this is just play. What actually do you see is it just like I'm trying to imagine you like going frame by frame right what could you actually see is that you'd imagine like it's a tilt of the head is it a blink is it a what it's hard for imagine what you could actually see. Well I'm looking at I'm looking at I was looking at all behaviors so first I would just code every behavior that happens I would code a bite if it happens but what I was looking for is play signals and there are specific play signals. And a bite isn't one of them that's that say I want to play or everything happens after this is pretend and like the play bow is the one everybody will recognize where dog puts their forelimbs down and their rub up and their tail is wagging. That's a proposal to play you can do that with your dog and and if you do that to what the question is is the other dog attending to you. I would look at the postures of the dog do they do that to dogs are facing them to the face and the side if the dogs face the side do they do some other mild behavior before they do a play signal. Do they wait till they got the other dogs attention so I was looking at the order of all the behaviors they did and I was looking at the postures of the dogs when they did them and then I could look at are they using attention getters are they using play signals and what are the states of attention of each dog. Wow that's super cool. All right last thing as I sort of mentioned earlier you know we need like an epic podcast to get to all these questions but I want to turn quickly to your book on looking 11 walks with expert eyes because one of the hopes of this podcast and what we're trying to do is tell us all think about what it means to be a careful observer to look hard at things to really understand takes some attention our own attention not with dogs but actually paying attention on things. So can you describe just briefly what led to this book and then are there any pieces of advice that came from these walks with dogs or otherwise that you might kind of leave us with is like here are some things. You know one I suggest people get the book and read it and engage with the the concepts but just like that you might advise us on to like say this is something I took or learned in that process of writing the book that you as people could apply or should think about as you're walking your dog today. I think the book really grow out of my being an animal behavior researcher and someone who found that when I started observing another species I saw things I didn't see before right it's really sort of as simple as that and there is more to see then we think there is in any scene and looking at any person or other animals behavior there's just more than the superficial thing that we think we see. Because I knew that when I studied dog behavior it changed the way I saw my own dogs behavior and how I interacted with her I thought well you know how much else is there to see if I just looked at other perspectives right in a very normal even boring environment so I took a walk around my block and I kind of noticed all the things I would notice on my block in New York and then I started taking people with me on that walk people who had really perceptual capacities that were different than mine and that's because for the most part they were professionals in a field that kind of lent them the ability to see differently right so one of the people I walked with was a geologist for instance right and when they walk around they're going to see the world as sort of rock or not rock and of the rocks they are familiar with the different types of rocks that are on the buildings that's what's made what's mixed up in the asphalt right what's that large boulder that nobody could build on or around in the city right so suddenly this same block is reconceived from this different point of view or I walked with an artist I walked with an urban wildlife expert who could see all the places that wildlife could live in the city I you know I walked with my child actually because they have a completely different oom vell than an adult right they're seeing things differently and we sometimes forget that and again with children sometimes you that's where a dissonance comes between parent and child that the child wants to just examine the thing on the sidewalk for 45 minutes while you want to have a walk and all of these walks and I did a dozen more that didn't make it in the book were just ways of reminding myself and the reader of all the different ways to see the same scene all the different perspectives that there are and what I encourage people to do if they're interested in that is just do exactly what I did just take a walk with someone who has a certain way of seeing so somebody who you have a friend who just loves fashion and you go for a walk just in the street or a walk just encouraging them to tell you what they see based on their fashion acuity what they're noticing that person is putting this together this way that's a new piece this is super vintage whatever they would see and itself enables you to kind of get a glimpse of their world and start to see a little bit of that landscape that otherwise you wouldn't have seen the complexity within I love that because I think one of the things that people sometimes take from I don't know how to say this other than to be blunt about it like I think people now have a lot of differences so one of the things that in the public consciousness etc people say look you need to listen to what other people have to say talk to people who have different opinions and get together and talk I think that's actually true but what I love about this is that it's not just that when you think what you're saying is that when you take a walk with someone else and see them observing things or hear what they have to say about things you actually see more yourself right that that's one element of it it's not just hey you need to you know take on this other person's perspectives because it's the piece you think to do right I do think we should listen to each other and there are other elements to this right I'm not diminishing that but I love that being an observer both from the natural world which is my bias and I know certain certain set yours but actually it doesn't just have to be it could be fashion or other things that when you expose yourself to other perspectives it changes you too because you become a better observer I think that's part of what the point is I really love that because it's sort of disarms in some ways some of the things that get in the way I think sometimes of us really trying to understand other people and other experiences it's not just about that it's about us being better at understanding what's going on and seeing it seeing the points of view right we assume that everything is is is just the way we see it right and that and that's the aggravation that people have with other people is just this is clearly the way it is and there's no other way to see it and no of course you know every person has a different way to see it and it's it's really enlarging enlarging I guess of my my own oomfeld to be able to get glimpses into other people's ways of course you know where the way I was doing it some of these people were experts they owner their professional that's a geologist this is a this is a person who looks for sign of insects and so forth and I can't just inherit their expertise right away but just to even have a little window into it is is really life changing in my mind it really has changed the way I interact with people and I can you know and now I'm very tedious on a walk because I know I can't help but stop and notice point out all the things but I think you know is the last thing your example of the children right the idea of spending time with a child is a great example because it doesn't have to be like it's great to go with someone who's amazing knowledge of geology or whatever but expanding your oomfeld sometimes is about just being with a child and we say we learn so much with children is sort of these descriptions but actually it's true that a child can change your oomfeld or expand your oomfeld because it forces you to pay attention to things that you normally just already are filtering out and have learned to filter out but might want to pay more attention to it certain times so absolutely yeah and there's a great pleasure in that yeah yeah I love that you said that because I do think part of the oomfeld is about pleasure and part of it's about you know being kind of understanding right but some of it's about pleasure too it's about the enrichment of our existence so well you've certainly enriched our existence I know there's lots more to talk about and lots more to ask you but I think we'll you know we'll be grateful right now that we've had this time to learn from you appreciate I hear I think I hear a collar shaking in the background that's right a dog a dog was maybe saying I think you're wrapping up that's also just on cue so Alexandra I hope you have a wonderful day in New York appreciate you and good luck with your research going forward and thanks again for joining us on the dog watching it was a real pleasure Mike thanks thanks again to Alexandra for sharing so many perspectives with us on dogs and how we observe to learn more check out her at Alexandra Horowitz.net and pick up one of her many books inside of a dog is a great place to start until our next shift this is Michael Canfield on the dog watch[Music][BLANK_AUDIO]