Grieving

I've always been an animal lover.  I grew up with dogs, and have had one or more dogs or cats all of my adult life.  Add to that a near-fanatical passion for birding, and a general fascination with wildlife of all sorts, and it's no wonder I went into biology.

My background in evolutionary genetics has driven home the point that humans aren't as different from the rest of the animal world as a lot of us seem to think.  The false distinction between "human" and "animal" is a pretty hard one to overcome, however, which explains the argument I got into with a professor at the University of Washington over a mouse he'd killed for experimental purposes when I was in an animal physiology class.

Even back then, I understood that non-human animals die for experimental purposes all the time.  Despite my youth, I had thought deeply about the ethical conundrum of sacrificing the lives of our fellow animals for the benefit of science and medicine, and had come to the conclusion (an opinion I still hold) that it is a necessary evil.  But what I could not stomach was the professor's cavalier attitude toward the life he'd just taken -- joking around, acting as if the little warm body he held in his hand had been nothing but a mobile lump of clay, worthy of no respect.

"It's not like animals have feelings," I recall his saying to me, with a faint sneer.  "If you spend your time anthropomorphizing animals, you'll never make it in this profession."

I remembered, while he was lecturing me in a patronizing fashion about my soft-heartedness, pets I had owned, and I had a momentary surge of self-doubt.  Was he right?  I began to question my own sense that my dogs and cats loved me, and were feeling something of the same kind of bond toward me that I felt toward them.  Is my puppy's wagging tail when I talk to him nothing more than what C. S. Lewis called a "cupboard love" -- merely a response that he knows will get him fed and petted and played with, and a warm place to sleep?

But I couldn't bring myself to believe that forty years ago, and I don't believe it now.  I have several times gone through the inevitable tragedy of losing beloved pets, and what has struck me each time is not only how I and my wife have reacted, but how our other animals have.  Most recently, when our sweet, quirky little one-eyed Shiba Inu, Cleo, somehow got out of our fence and was hit and killed by a passing car, our big old pit bull Guinness went into a positive decline.

It was unexpected in a way, because Cleo and Guinness didn't really interact all that much; they kind of didn't speak the same language.  Cleo, typical of her breed, was independent, curious, and eccentric; Guinness is strongly bonded to us (especially my wife, whom he follows around like a shadow), protective, and thinks that chasing a tennis ball is the most fun hobby ever.  But when Cleo died, Guinness went into a prolonged period of grief that nearly matched our own.

Recent experiments have shown that the neurochemical underpinning of emotions in our brain are shared by dogs and cats -- they experience a surge of oxytocin when they see their friends (whether human or not) just like we do.  When I go out to get the mail and come back inside under a minute later, and my puppy Jethro greets me as if he thought I'd abandoned him forever and ever and OMIGOD I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE BACK, he really is experiencing something like the rush we feel when seeing someone we dearly love.

Of course, he does like belly rubs, too.

If you needed one more piece of evidence of the falsehood of my long-ago professor's contention that non-human animals don't experience emotion, it came out this week in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.  A study of pet cats -- an animal widely considered to be independent and self-sufficient -- experience genuine grief when a family member dies, even if that family member is another pet...

... and even when it's a dog.

The study analyzed the behavior of 450 cats that had gone through loss, and the results were widely consistent -- grieving cats slept and ate less, vocalized more, hid more, refused to play but became clingy, and appeared to look for their lost friend.  "Unlike dogs, we tend to think that cats are aloof and not social," said Jennifer Vonk, a comparative/cognitive psychologist at Oakland University and a co-author of the work.  "They may not form packs like wild dogs, but in the wild, cats still tend to band together and form hierarchies...  I think we’ve been mischaracterizing them."

The divide between ourselves and our pets -- and by extension, between us and the rest of the natural world -- is far narrower than many of us think.  A lot of pet owners say "he understands every word I say" (I've been guilty of that myself), which is certainly untrue, but the emotional resonance between pets and the rest of the members of their household is undeniable.  And grief is experienced deeply by a great many more species than ourselves.

But y'all'll have to excuse me.  Jethro is looking at me with his big, soulful brown eyes.  He hasn't lost a friend or anything, but probably would like a belly rub.

Gotta keep my priorities straight.

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Since this post is pet-related, I thought it was a good opportunity to put in a plug for our Third Annual Pandemic Pottery Sale.  My wife and I are both amateur potters, so we tend to get overrun with pottery we don't have space for.  Two years ago, we came up with the idea of selling a bunch of it and donating the proceeds to charity.  This year the recipient we chose is the fabulous Stay Wild Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (where we got our two wonderful rescue dogs Jethro and Rosie).  They do fantastic work and are constantly dealing with costly animal care and bringing dogs and cats from states with kill shelters (Jethro came from Georgia, Rosie from Texas), which is crazy expensive.

The way it works is if you see a piece you like, you make a bid on it.  If no one else bids, it's yours.  If there are competing bids, the high one gets the piece.  A few provisos: first, the shipping costs outside of the United States are prohibitively expensive -- so unfortunately, this event is limited to our American friends.  Second, all of the pieces EXCEPT AS MARKED are food safe, microwave safe, and dishwasher safe.  However: we work with stoneware clay, which is not completely vitrified even when glazed and fired properly, so if you're using a piece to hold water long-term (mostly this caution is for vases) make sure to put something underneath it so you don't ruin nice furniture.  (Many of them won't leak, but don't take the chance.)

Once most of the pieces are claimed, we'll present Jane George, who runs Stay Wild, with what will hopefully be a big check!

So check out the website, take a look at the gallery, and bid on what takes your fancy!  Feel free to pass the link along to interested friends.  Enjoy!

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Puppy dog eyes

We have two dogs, our big thirty-kilogram galumphing galoot, Guinness:

And his comical sidekick, little eight-kilogram Cleo:

They are best buddies and love to be outside playing together, which is as fun for us as it is for them because watching them is so damn comical.  Cleo is about twice as fast as Guinness is, and runs in circles around him, sometimes attempting a full-on body slam that is completely unsuccessful because of this inconvenient law of physics called Conservation of Momentum.  Usually Cleo just ricochets off Guinness's side like a ping-pong ball off a boulder, but it never seems to discourage her from trying again.

Remember Chester and Spike, from Looney Tunes?

Yeah, that's Guinness and Cleo, right there.

Carol and I frequently laugh ruefully at how many times a day we say, "They are so stinkin' cute."  I mean, it's true, but it's kind of ridiculous how much they have us wrapped around their paws.  Guinness, especially, has an incredibly expressive face, and when we talk to him he gazes up at us adoringly as if he's hanging on every word we say.  The funny thing is that it doesn't, in fact, matter what exactly it is we're saying.  We could be explaining to him something like why it is not a good idea to eat the sofa, or reading to him from a text on economics for that matter, and he will still stare at us as if to say, "My god, yes!  That's genius!  I never would have thought of that!"

A paper presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Anatomy has shown that this ability dogs have to communicate with their facial expressions is no accident.  Researchers Anne Burrows and Kailey Omstead of Duquesne University did a detailed comparison of mimetic muscles -- the tiny muscles in the face that allows us (and other animals) to alter our expressions -- between domestic dogs and wolves, and they found something fascinating.

To understand what's going on here you have to know a little about muscle composition.  In the broadest-brush terms, mammals have two types of skeletal muscles; fast-twitch muscles, which can contract rapidly and powerfully but aren't able to maintain sustained contraction, and slow-twitch muscles, which are much slower to react but can remain contracted for long periods.  Our upper bodies are predominantly fast-twitch muscle; this is why lifting a heavy weight with your arms is doable, but keeping it lifted for more than a few minutes is excruciatingly difficult.  On the other hand, the three big muscle groups in your upper legs -- the quadriceps, biceps femoris (hamstrings), and gluteus maximus -- have to maintain tension just to allow you to support your own body weight, but can do so for hours without fatiguing.  One of the reasons for this is that slow-twitch muscles have a protein called myoglobin, which improves the ability of the muscle to absorb oxygen from the blood; it's this protein that makes the dark meat of a chicken dark.  And notice which two muscles are dark meat -- the leg and the thigh, same as us.

Not that I'm recommending eating humans, mind you.

Anyhow, back to dogs.  The analysis by Burrows and Omstead found a striking difference in the muscle composition of dogs' faces as compared to wild wolves; dogs' mimetic muscles are predominantly fast-twitch, while wolves' are predominantly slow-twitch.  What this means is that dogs' faces are much quicker to change in expression.  Wolves do have expressions; one obvious example is the wrinkled forehead and retracted lip that signifies aggression or anger.  But domestic dogs can alter their expressions rapidly and subtly in response to the circumstances, allowing them to communicate with humans in a way few other animals can.

"Dogs are unique from other mammals in their reciprocated bond with humans which can be demonstrated though mutual gaze, something we do not observe between humans and other domesticated mammals such as horses or cats," said study co-author Anne Burrows.  "Our preliminary findings provide a deeper understanding of the role facial expressions play in dog-human interactions and communication."

This difference between dogs and their wolf cousins is almost certainly due to unwitting artificial selection by humans -- our ancestors back in the Paleolithic, when we have the first evidence of dog/human cohabitation, selected the puppies that were the most responsive to us as companions.  (At the same time, selection was going on for other features as well, such as size, color, and skill at tasks like herding or retrieving.)  Over the intervening years this selection has actually altered the composition of the muscles in our canine friends' faces, so that they're even better at communicating with us.

Which I think is amazingly cool.  But I'd better wrap this up, because Guinness just looked at me with a furrowed brow and a head tilt, which means he wants his breakfast.  You know how it goes.

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Fictional friendships

I learned a new term yesterday: parasocial relationship.

It means "a strong, one-sided social bond with a fictional character or celebrity."  I've never much gotten the "celebrity" side of this; I don't, for example, give a flying rat's ass who is and is not keeping up with the Kardashians.  But fictional characters?

Oh, yeah.  No question.  I have wondered if my own career as a novelist was spurred by the parasocial relationships (now that I know the term, dammit, I'm gonna use it) I formed with fictional characters very early on.  In my first two decades, I was deeply invested in what happened to:

• The intrepid Robinson family in Lost in Space.  This might have been in part because I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen, who is drop-dead gorgeous even though in retrospect the character she played didn't have much... character.
• The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Some of the old Star Trek episodes are almost as cringeworthy as Lost in Space, but when I was ten and I heard Scotty say, "The warp core is gonna blow!  I canna stop it, Captain!  Ye canna change the laws of physics!", I believed him.
• Carl Kolchak from the TV series The Night Stalker.  Okay, so apparently I gravitated toward cringeworthy series. 
• Luke Skywalker and his buddies.  I'll admit it, I cried when Obi-Wan died, even though you find out immediately afterward that he's still around in spirit form, if Becoming One With The Force can be considered an afterlife.

Books hooked me as well, sometimes even more powerfully than television and movies.  A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Chronicles of Prydain... I could go on and on.  Most of which caused the shedding of considerable numbers of tears over the fate of some character or another.

More recently, my obsession is Doctor Who, which will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia because I seem to find a way to work some Who reference into every other post.  Not only do I spend an inordinate time discussing Doctor Who trivia with other fans, I have found a way to combine this with another hobby:

I made a ceramic Dalek, Weeping Angel, and K-9, which sit on my desk watching me as I work.  I'm careful not to blink.

The reason this comes up is a paper in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at these parasocial relationships -- specifically, whether the COVID-19 pandemic had weakened our relationships with actual people, perhaps with a commensurate strengthening of our one-sided relationships with fictional characters.  

The heartening results are that the pandemic hasn't weakened our bonds to our friends, but there has been a strengthening of bonds to the fictional characters we love.  So, real friends of mine, you don't need to worry that my incessant fanboying over the Doctor is going to impact our relationship negatively, unless you get so completely fed up with my obsession you decide to hang around with someone who wants to discuss something more grounded in reality, like fantasy football teams.

"The development, maintenance, and dissolution of socio-emotional bonds that media audiences form with televised celebrities and fictional characters has long been a scholarly interest of mine," said study author Bradley J. Bond, of the University of San Diego, in an interview with PsyPost.  "The social function of our parasocial relationships with media figures has been debated in the literature: do our parasocial relationships supplement our real-life friendships?  Can they compensate for deficiencies in our social relationships?...  Social distancing protocols and quarantine behaviors that spawned from the global COVID-19 pandemic provided an incredibly novel opportunity to study how our parasocial relationships with media figures function as social alternatives when the natural environment required individuals to physically distance themselves from their real-life friends...  [The research suggests that] our friendships are durable, and we will utilize media technologies to maintain our friendships when our opportunities for in-person social engagement are significantly limited.  However, our favorite celebrities and fictional characters may become even more important components of our social worlds when we experience severe alterations to our friendships."

Which I find cheering.  The pandemic has forced us all into coping mode, and it's nice to know that the tendency of many of us to retreat into books, television, and movies isn't jeopardizing our relationships with real people.

So I guess I'm free to throw myself emotionally into fictional relationships.  However much they cost me in anguish.  For example, I will never forgive Russell T. Davies for what he did to the beloved companion Donna Noble in the last minutes of the episode "Journey's End:"

That was just not fair.  I can't even look at a still shot of this scene without choking up.

Be that as it may, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my fanboy tendencies, and that by and large, such obsessions are harmless.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my ceramic replica of the TARDIS.  Maybe I can install a little speaker inside it so when I press the button, it'll make the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.  How cool would that be?

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As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Doggie determination

Our dog Guinness has brought home the truth of the quip that cats are teenagers, dogs are toddlers.

His engine has two settings: "full throttle" and "off."  We got him two and a half years ago as an eleven-month-old rescue, so he has settled down a little as compared to the irrepressible puppy exuberance he came with.  Which is a bit of a relief.  Handling seventy pounds' worth of irrepressible puppy exuberance can be a little exhausting.

He is never content unless he's interacting with either me or my wife.  "Will you please go entertain yourself for a while?" is a common phrase heard around Chez Bloomgarden-Bonnet.  And he doesn't just want to interact with us any old way; it has to be exactly the right way.  He loves to play fetch -- can do so for hours on end -- but not if we're standing on the patio.  No, throwing the ball into the lawn from the patio is not the proper way.  A true game of fetch must be played from a seated position, in one of the lawn chairs next to the pond.  I kid you not.  From the patio, he'll chase the ball once, pick it up, and then stare at us with an expression like, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?"  Move a hundred yards in a westward direction to the lawn chairs by the pond, and he will happily retrieve over and over.  And over and over and over.

No, I don't get it, either.

Be that as it may, he is extraordinarily sensitive to our moods, tone of voice, and body language, and seems to watch us constantly for cues about what is going on.  We can talk about him without using any obvious clue-words like his name, or even dog or play or ball, and he immediately knows (to judge by the fact that his tail will start wagging, even if he appeared to be sound asleep).  When we talk to him directly, he stares at us with this eager expression, like he really wants to understand every word we're saying.  If it's a bit above his head, he gives us the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement:

"I'm so disappointed in myself," he seems to be saying.  "I will try much harder to understand next time."

You might even say he shows dogged determination.  *rimshot*

He's also one of the most affectionate dogs I've ever known.  Like I said, his number one priority is interacting with us as much as possible.

The reason all this comes up is because of a study that appeared this week in the journal Current Biology that strongly suggests dogs come pre-wired to connect with humans -- i.e., this isn't learned behavior.  Dogs may refine these skills, and learn specific cues and behaviors, but the ability is innate.

Led by Hannah Salomons of Duke University, this study compared the behavior of puppies and wolf cubs, both groups of which had been given equal prior exposure to humans.  They found that the puppies automatically responded to people -- they were much more willing to come up to a person spontaneously, make eye contact, and look to the human for cues about what to do.  Wolves, on the other hand, started out afraid, and would huddle in the corner when a person came close, and even once habituated to people's presence would mostly ignore them rather than interact.  "They acted like I was a piece of furniture," Salomons said.

Most fascinating of all, puppies seem to come equipped with at least some level of a "theory of mind" -- knowledge that their own perspective isn't shared by everyone, and that the world would look different through the eyes of another.  One of the most rudimentary theory-of-mind tests is to point at a treat on the floor that is visually hidden from the dog -- i.e., you can see it, the dog can't.  Wolves don't respond to this at all; dogs usually pick up on it right away.  And it's a more sophisticated response than it seems at first.  To figure out what pointing means, the dog has to think, "If I was standing where (s)he is, sight-lining down the arm toward the floor, where would it be indicating?"

"Dogs are born with this innate ability to understand that we're communicating with them and we're trying to cooperate with them," Salomons said, in an interview with Science Daily.

We not only cooperate with them, we also provide a valuable opportunity for them to get dressed up fancy now and again.

It seems like this in-touchness dogs are born with has come from millennia of domestication, where their use as companions meant that generation after generation people were selecting the most responsive, interactive dogs, meaning their capacity for bonding to humans increased over time.  Contrast that to cats -- and I mean no disparagement of our feline friends -- but they are often characterized as more aloof and self-reliant than dogs.  No surprise, really; having cats as companion animals is a relatively recent innovation, while there is good evidence that dogs have been companions back at least thirty thousand years.

"This study really solidifies the evidence that the social genius of dogs is a product of domestication," said Brian Hare, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke, senior author of the study.  "It's this ability that makes dogs such great service animals.  It is something they are really born prepared to do."

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me.  Guinness wants something.  I'm not sure if it's food, petting, or an early round of fetch-the-ball.  Maybe some of each.  Don't worry, I'll figure it out.

Which, incidentally, brings up the awkward question of who domesticated whom.

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I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]