In this article:
- Do dogs see the world through their noses?
- Do dogs know when time is passing?
- Can dogs get bored?
- Do dogs understand what we’re saying?
- Do dogs see us as family?
Recently, Alexandra Horowitz, PhD, who leads the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College and wrote Inside of a Dog, was a guest on The Oprah Podcast. The Farmer’s Dog was proud to sponsor the episode.
Digest has shared Dr. Horowitz’s views on dogs many times over the years, because she’s one of the world’s leading experts on dog cognition—and her insights help us get closer to our dogs and take better care of them. You can read some of the most fascinating things she said on The Oprah Podcast below, and listen to the whole episode here.
Do dogs see the world through their noses?
While humans may be more likely to map their reality through sight, dogs’ most important sense is smell. “When you start to understand it from their point of view,” Dr. Horowitz said, “It’s a completely different world. It’s a smelly universe.” In the interview, Dr. Horowitz explained that “there are dogs who can detect a picogram of explosives, which is a trillionth of a gram.” They can also smell illnesses and human emotions (in fact, on Digest, we’ve written about research showing that dogs can smell stress). This applies even to dogs who haven’t been specially trained.
Do dogs know when time is passing?
One of the things dogs can smell, incredibly, is the passage of time. “The longer you’re gone,” Dr. Horowitz explained, “the less your space smells of you being there.” In general, she said, dogs know the difference between when you’ve been gone for a few minutes, hours, or longer—and research has shown that dogs react differently to the returns of people who have been absent for more time. “The longer the people were gone,” Horowitz said, “the more tail wagging, licking, shaking, [and] intense of a greeting they got.” Per Dr. Horowitz, dogs also remember the past and think about the future.
Can dogs get bored?
Because dogs don’t live only in the moment, they, like us, can get bored. “If we give them nothing to do,” Dr. Horowitz said, “they’ll find things to do. I think a lot of what we think of as misbehavior, pulling out our shoes and chewing on them and so forth, that’s because they were bored. They didn’t have anything to do.” That’s one of many reasons you should keep their lives interesting and fun.
Do dogs understand what we’re saying?
Dogs can’t talk, but they are very good at picking up on what people are saying to them. “If we talk to them clearly,” Dr. Horowitz said, “most dogs will learn dozens of words. And there are some amazing dogs who have learned hundreds of words.” Dr. Horowitz also said that there’s a good reason we often use baby talk around our dogs (beyond the fact that they’re so cute that it’s hard not to). She said that scientists call this way of talking to a dog “dog-directed speech,” and that “it lets the dog know that of all this bubbling speech around them, some of it is directed to them—and that’s the part they should pay attention to.”
Do dogs see us as family?
Dr. Horowitz said that trainers who emphasize the need to dominate your dog have mistaken ideas about the way dogs actually think and behave. Dogs, she explained, are not competing for control of our households. “They view us as parents, essentially,” she said. “And we control all aspects of their life already… we don’t need to worry that they’re going to try to threaten our leadership and boss them or bully them around for it.” This is one reason that, when Digest asked Dr. Horowitz whether people should let dogs sleep in their beds, she said it was fine to do so as long as the people and the dogs were both happy with the arrangement.
For much more detail, listen to Dr. Horowitz’s whole interview on The Oprah Podcast.
The post How Do Dogs See the World? Ask Alexandra Horowitz. appeared first on The Farmer’s Dog - Digest.
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