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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Birdwalking through life

I have sometimes compared the sensation inside my brain as being like riding the Tilt-o-Whirl backwards.

I've had a combination of an extremely short attention span and insatiable curiosity since I was a kid.  I still remember when I was about ten and my parents splurged on a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, figuring (rightly) that it would come in handy during my education.  What they didn't figure on was my capacity for getting completely and inextricably lost in it.  I'd start out looking up some fact -- say, what year James Madison was elected president -- then get distracted by a nearby entry and head off toward that, and before you knew it I was sitting on the living room floor with a dozen of the volumes open to articles having to do with a string of only vaguely-connected topics.  I could start out with James Madison and end up in an entry for the flora and fauna of Cameroon, with no real idea how I'd gotten from one to the other.

That facet of my personality hasn't changed any in the intervening five-odd decades.  I still birdwalk my way through the world, something regular readers of Skeptophilia undoubtedly know all too well (and if you are a regular reader, thank you for putting up with my whirligig approach to life).  Now, of course, I don't need an Encyclopedia Brittanica; the internet is positively made for people like me, to judge by the winding path I took just yesterday.

It all started when I was doing some research into the origin of the word cynosure (meaning "something attention-getting, a guidepost or focal point") for my popular feature "Ask Linguistics Guy" over on TikTok.  I was pretty certain that the word came from the Greek κυνός, meaning "dog," but I wasn't sure of the rest of the derivation.  (I was right about κυνός, but for the rest of the story you'll have to check out my video, which I'll post later today on TikTok.)

But while looking up cynosure my eye was caught by the preceding entry in the etymological dictionary, cynocephaly.  Which means "having a dog's head."

Fig. 1: an example of cynocephaly.  Of course, he's kind of cyno-everything, so it probably doesn't count.  And if you are thinking that I'm only using this as an excuse to post a photograph of my extremely cute puppy, you're on to me.

A more common usage of cynocephaly is someone who has a dog's head and a human body, and it was apparently a fairly common belief back in the day that such beings existed.  In the fifth century B.C.E. the Greek writer Ctesias of Cnidus wrote a book in which he claimed that there was a whole race of cynocephalic people in India, which he was free to say because he'd apparently never been there and neither had any of his readers.  Other writers said that the Cynocephali lived in Libya or Serbia or Finland or Sumatra; you'd think the fact that none of those places are close to each other would have clued them in that there was something amiss, but no.  There was even a discussion in the ninth century, launched amongst the church fathers by a theologian named Ratramnus of Corbie, about whether dog-headed people would have eternal souls or not, because if they did, it was incumbent upon the Christians to find them and preach the Gospel to them.

As far as I know, this discussion came to nothing, mostly because the Cynocephali don't exist.

In any case, this got me on the track of looking into the attitudes of the medievals toward dogs, and my next stop was the story of Saint Guinefort.  If you've never heard of Saint Guinefort, I'm sure you're not alone; he was never officially beatified by the Catholic Church, because he's a dog.  The legend goes that a knight near Lyon had a greyhound named Guinefort, and he left his infant son in the care of the dog one day (that's some solid parenting, right there).  Well, when the knight returned, the cradle was overturned, and Guinefort's jaws were dripping blood.  The infuriated knight pulled his sword and killed the dog, assuming Guinefort had killed the baby.  Only then did he think to turn the cradle over (a real genius, this knight) -- and there was the baby, safe and sound, along with a dead viper covered with dog bites.  So the knight felt just terrible, and erected a shrine to Guinefort, who was venerated in the area as a saint, despite the local priests saying "Hey, you can't do that!" and even threatening to fine people who came there to pray.  The whole episode supposedly happened in the thirteenth century -- but people were still bringing their sick children to be blessed by Saint Guinefort in the 1940s!

From there I started looking into folklore surrounding protectors of children, and after several more jumps that I won't belabor you with, I ended up reading about the mythical monster called Coco (or Cucuy) from Spain and Portugal.  The Coco is a hooded figure that is supposed to haunt houses with children, sometimes appearing only as a stray shadow cast by no physical object.  (Shades of the pants-wettingly terrifying Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Identify Crisis," which if you haven't watched I highly recommend -- only don't watch it while you're alone.)

Fig. 2: "Wait a moment... whose shadow is that?"  *shudder*

Anyhow, the idea is that El Coco particularly goes after disobedient children, so the legend probably started as a way for parents to get their kids to behave.  The problem with these kinds of stories, though, is that it's a fine line between scaring kids enough to obey the rules and scaring them so much they refuse to sleep, which is why there are lullabies about keeping the Coco away.  Some are barely better than the legend itself:

Duérmete niño, duérmete ya...
Que viene el Coco y te comerá

(Sleep child, sleep or else...
Coco will come and eat you)

I don't know about you, but that would have pacified the absolute shit out of me when I was four years old.  I would have been so pacified I wouldn't have closed my eyes until I was in my mid-twenties.  Then there's this one, from Portugal:

Vai-te Coco. Vai-te Coco
Para cima do telhado
Deixa o menino dormir
Um soninho descansado
Dorme neném
Que a Coco vem pegar
Papai foi pra roça
Mamãe foi trabalhar

(Leave Coco. Leave Coco
Go to the top of the roof
Let the child have
A quiet sleep
Sleep little baby
That Coco comes to get you
Daddy went to the farm
Mommy went to work)

Because there's nothing like "hey, kid, your parents are gone, so you're on your own if the monsters come" to get a child to settle down.  Maybe they should have hired a greyhound or something.

Fig. 3: Que Viene el Coco, by Goya (1799).  The mom looks like she's about to say, "You can have the kids, I'm getting right the fuck outta here."  [Image is in the Public Domain]

In the "See Also" listings at the bottom of the page for El Coco was an entry for Madame Koi-Koi, who sounded interesting (and whom I had also never heard of).  So that was my next stop.  Turns out Madame Koi-Koi is -- and I am not making up the wording -- "one of the most popular boarding school ghosts in Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa."  Myself, I wouldn't have thought there were enough boarding school ghosts to turn it into a competition, but shows you what I know.  Supposedly Madame Koi-Koi is the ghost of a wicked teacher who was killed by her own students because of her cruelty, and now she haunts schools.  She always wears high heels -- "Koi-Koi" is apparently imitative of the sound her heels make on the floor -- so at least you can hear her coming.  Her favorite thing is to corner students in the bathroom for some reason, especially at night.

Getting up to pee at two a.m. is a fraught affair, in many African boarding schools.

Anyhow, I suppose I've recounted enough of my wanderings.  I'd like to tell you that I stopped there and then went and did something productive, but that would be a lie.  But at least you have a sense of what it's like in my head 24/7.

I hope you enjoyed the ride.  At least you can get off.

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Dog days

Our new dog, Jethro, is in the middle of a six-week puppy obedience class.

After three weeks of intensive training, he reliably knows the command "Sit."  That's about it.  The difficulty is he's the most chill dog I've ever met.  He's not motivated to do much of anything except whatever it takes to get a belly rub. 

Jethro in a typical position

Otherwise, whatever he's doing, he's perfectly content to keep doing it, especially if it doesn't require any extra effort.  In class a couple of weeks ago I finally got him to lie down when I said, "Down," but then he didn't want to get up again.  In fact, he flopped over on his side and refused to move even when I tried tempting him with a doggie treat.  After a few minutes, the instructor said, "Is your dog still alive?"

I assured him that he was, and that this was typical behavior.

After a few more futile attempts, I gave up, sat on the floor, and gave him a belly rub.

Jethro, not the instructor.

So after working with Jethro in class and at home, I've reached three conclusions:

1. He has an incredibly sweet, friendly disposition.
2. He's cute as a button.
3. He has the IQ of a PopTart.

When we give him a command, he looks at us with this cheerful expression, as if to say, "Those are words, aren't they?  I'm pretty sure those are words."  Then he thinks, "Maybe those words have something to do with belly rubs."  So he flops over on his back, and his lone functioning brain cell goes back to sleep, having accomplished its mission.

Jethro in a rare philosophical mood

I couldn't help but think of Jethro when I read a study out of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, which looked at how an electroencephalogram trace changes when dogs are told the names of things (rather than commands to do things), and it found that the parts of the brain that are involved in mental representations of objects activate in dogs -- just as they do in humans.  The upshot is that dogs seem to form mental images when they hear the names of the objects.

"Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words," said study lead author Marianna Boros, in an interview with Science Daily.  "They also don't just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name."

Interestingly, this response seemed to be irrespective of a particular dog's vocabulary.  "It doesn't matter how many object words a dog understands," Boros said.  "Known words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in some exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects."

"Dogs are not merely learning a specific behavior to certain words, but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do," said Lilla Magyari, who co-authored the study.  "Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of."

Well, okay, maybe your dog does.  With Jethro, the best response he seems to be capable of is mild puzzlement.  I wish he'd been one of the test subjects, but my fear would be that when they'd say a word to him, the response on the EEG would be *soft static*, and the researchers would come to me with grave expressions and say, "I'm sorry to give you the bad news, Mr. Bonnet, but your dog appears not to have any higher brain function."

Of course, I have to admit that it's hard to discern between "I don't understand what you're saying" and "I don't give a damn about what you're saying."  Yesterday when my wife was trying to teach him to catch a foam rubber frisbee, and he repeatedly allowed the frisbee to bonk off of the top of his head, it might be that he knew perfectly well what she wanted him to do and just didn't want to do it.  So perhaps Lilla Magyari's right, and he's smarter than we think he is. 

Given how often he's persuaded us to give up on all the "Sit," "Down," and "Stay" bullshit and just give him a belly rub, maybe he's not the one who's a slow learner.

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Going to the dogs

I understand dogs a great deal better than I understand my fellow humans.

Dogs are straightforward.  They interact with their world in a direct way, whether it be motivated by love, anger, curiosity, hunger, enthusiasm, or fear.  There's nothing feigned about a dog's emotions or the way they express them.  I've sometimes misinterpreted one of my dogs' signals, but that's on me; the signals were there, even if I only recognized them in retrospect.  Once you grok dog behavior, it's much less fraught than the complex, confusing morass of human interaction.

This is why when I'm invited to social events, I'm always hoping the host will have a dog so there'll be someone for me to have a conversation with.

The dogs we've had have nearly all been rescues, and came with all the baggage and bad backstories that rescue dogs have, but one and all were and are wonderful companions, and enriched our lives tremendously.  This latter part is the only possible explanation for why during the holidays, my wife and I were looking around and thinking, "Wow, our house sure has a lot of clutter and dirt and chaos.  We never seem to be able to keep up with the housekeeping.  Hey, I know... let's get a puppy!"

So, without further ado, allow me to introduce to the Skeptophilia readership...

... Jethro.

Jethro is -- and I say this with all modesty and restraint -- the cutest puppy in the whole entire world.  He's five months old, has the sweetest, happiest disposition ever, and soft, silky hair that gathers burs, mud, and debris like some sort of bizarre magnet.  Like many puppies, he has two settings -- "Full Throttle" and "Off."

He's currently set at "Off" and is sleeping at my feet, which is the only way I'm able to write this.  Otherwise I would be engaged in the essential task of Playing With Jethro.

We got him from the amazing Stay Wild Rescue and Wildlife Rehabilitation Center on New Year's Eve.  If you are looking for a wonderful and deserving place to make a donation, please consider Stay Wild.  They do fantastic work on a shoestring budget, and the owners -- Jane George and Dan Soboleski -- work tirelessly to help find rescue pets forever homes, and to rehabilitate wild animals for re-release.  Please check out their website and consider supporting them.

In the few days we've had Jethro, he's already bonded with our other two dogs, Guinness and Rosie.  Rosie is an Australian Cattle Dog mix who pretty much loves everyone, so she was easy.

Guinness is a big galumphing American Staffordshire Terrier/Husky/Chow cross who can be cranky and gets jealous easily, especially when it comes to sharing Carol's attention with anyone, because he's a big ol' Mama's Boy.  He is, however, a very natty dresser. 

But yesterday, all three of them were romping around together in the back yard, and Guinness was letting Jethro chase him like they'd been best friends forever instead of just three days.  Guinness even responded with the doggie "play-bow" before they took off running again.

Like with most rescues, we're not sure what kind of a mix Jethro is.  Jane at Stay Wild said she thought he had some Golden Retriever in him, which makes sense given his silky coat and general head shape, but his striking and beautiful black face and brindle coloration have to come from somewhere else.  He's got huge paws, indicating he's got some serious growing to do, but whether he'll turn out to be long and lanky or barrel-chested and stocky is anyone's guess.  Dog-loving friends of mine have speculated a lot of possible contributions to his ancestry -- suggestions have included various spaniels and setters, Border Collie, Boxer, German Shepherd, even Saint Bernard -- but we won't be sure until we have him DNA-tested.  (The kit has already been ordered.)

A photo of Jethro from five minutes ago, because why not

It's tempting to say his lovable, playful temperament is indicative of his Golden Retriever genes, but a surprising study at the University of Massachusetts just last year found the contribution of breed to behavior is way smaller than most people think.  We often associate particular behavioral traits with certain types of dog -- labs are friendly and loyal, hounds laid-back but stubborn, Dalmatians nervous and prone to biting, and so on -- but the researchers found exceptions to the rule are so common that the rule isn't really a rule.  And while we've had dogs who seemed to conform to the breed expectations, all of them have their own unique characteristics and quirks.

Dogs are as varied in personality as people are, I suppose.

In any case, now we've got three dogs.  I commented yesterday that this means we're outnumbered, and that it's a good thing this is a benevolent dictatorship and not a democracy.  Although a friend of mine responded, "I'm sure your dogs would vote for you anyway."

Given the fact that Jethro is snoozing happily right next to me, I suspect my friend is right.

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The smell of time passing

We once owned a very peculiar border collie named Doolin.  Although from what I've heard, saying "very peculiar" in the same breath as "border collie" is kind of redundant.  The breed has a reputation for being extremely intelligent, hyperactive, job-oriented, and more than a little neurotic, and Doolin fit the bill in all respects.

As far as the "intelligent" part, she's the dog who learned to open the slide bolts on our fence by watching us do it only two or three times.  I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it with my own eyes.  She also took her job very seriously, and by "job" I mean "life."  She had a passion for catching frisbees, but I always got the impression that it wasn't because it was fun.  It was because the Russian judge had only given her a 9.4 on the previous catch and she was determined to improve her score.

There were ways in which her intelligence was almost eerie at times.  I was away from home one time and called Carol to say hi, and apparently Doolin looked at her with question marks in her eyes.  Carol said, "Doolin, it's Daddy!"  Doolin responded by becoming extremely excited and running around the house looking in all of the likely spots -- my office, the recliner, the workshop -- as well as some somewhat less likely places like under the bed.  When the search was unsuccessful, apparently she seemed extremely worried for the rest of the evening.

Not that this was all that different from her usual expression.

One thing that always puzzled us, though, was her ability to sense when we were about to get home.  Doolin routinely went to the door and stood there on guard before Carol's car pulled into the driveway.  She did the same thing, I heard, when I was about to arrive.  In each case, there was no obvious cue that she could have relied on; we live on a fairly well-traveled stretch of rural highway and even if she heard our cars in the distance, I can't imagine they sound that different from any of the other hundreds of cars that pass by daily.  And my arrival time, especially, varied considerably from day to day, because of after-school commitments.  How, then, did she figure out we were about to get home -- or was it just dart-thrower's bias again, and we were noticing the times she got it right and ignoring all the times she didn't?

According to Alexandra Horowitz, a professor of psychology at Barnard University, there's actually something to this observation.  There are hundreds of anecdotal accounts of the same kind of behavior, enough that (although there hasn't been much in the way of a systematic study) there's almost certainly a reason behind it other than chance.  Horowitz considered the well-documented ability of dogs to follow a scent trail the right direction by sensing where the signal was weakest -- presumably the oldest part of the trail -- and heading toward where it was stronger.  The difference in intensity is minuscule, especially given that to go the right direction the dog can't directly compare the scent right here to the scent a half a kilometer away, but has to compare the scent here to the scent a couple of meters away.

What Horowitz wondered is if dogs are using scent intensity as a kind of clock -- the diminishment of a person's scent signal after they leave the house gives the dog a way of knowing how much time has elapsed.  This makes more sense than any other explanation I've heard, which include (no lie) that dogs are psychic and are telepathically sensing your approach.  Biological clocks of all kinds are only now being investigated and understood, including how they are entrained -- how the internal state is aligned to external cues.  (The most obvious examples of entrainment are the alignment of our sleep cycle to light/dark fluctuations, and seasonal behaviors in other animals like hibernation and migration in response to cues like decreasing day length.)

So it's possible that dogs are entraining this bit of their behavior using their phenomenally sensitive noses.  It'll be interesting to see what Horowitz does with her hypothesis; it's certainly worth testing.  Now, I need to wrap this up because Guinness's biological clock just went off and told him it was time to play ball.  Of course, that happens about fifty times a day, so there may not be anything particularly surprising there.

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Woolly dogs

When I lived in Olympia, Washington, I knew a woman who was a professional spinner and weaver.  She made beautiful wearable items as well as decorative wall hangings, throw rugs, and blankets.

What's unusual about her is that among the many kinds of fiber she used was dog hair.  She owned three enormous (and extremely friendly and exuberant) Great Pyrenees, a breed with huge quantities of silky white hair, and she'd periodically brush their coats, wash the fur that came out, and spin it into thread.  She showed me a knit hat she'd made entirely from dog fur -- it was softer than angora.

Turns out, that region of the world has a long history of doing this.  A paper last week in Science looked at a legend amongst the Coast Salish, especially the Sto:lo, Skokomish, and Snuneymuxw tribes, of "woolly dogs" whose soft fur was spun, dyed, and woven into ceremonial rugs and cloaks that were a symbol of authority.  (My weaver friend in Washington didn't belong to this tradition -- she was from Luton, England -- although she may have gotten inspiration for it from Indigenous sources.  Or, maybe, she just owned three gigantic hairy dogs and came up with a way to use the copious fur they produced.  I'm not sure.)

In any case, the people of European descent who settled in the Northwest thought this was just a legend -- that any dogs belonging to the Coast Salish were very recent imports, possibly the descendants of dogs brought in by whalers and explorers from Japan or Russia.  In any case, the woolly dogs of the Salish had completely vanished by 1900, so it seemed like there was no way to be sure.  But there was one hard piece of evidence to study -- the pelt of a dog named Mutton who had been acquired as a puppy by an ethnographer in 1859.

Artist's rendition of what Mutton looked like [Image courtesy of Science and artist Karen Carr]

DNA analysis of Mutton's pelt showed something fascinating -- he wasn't closely related to Japanese breeds like the Akita or Shiba Inu, nor to northern European breeds like the Spitz and Samoyed.  Mutton's DNA showed his lineage had diverged from all other known dog breeds at least four thousand years ago, so very likely he and the others of his breed had been brought over from Siberia by the ancestors of the Coast Salish many millennia ago.

"It’s nice to hear Western science say this is how long you’ve had a relationship with woolly dogs," said study co-author Michael Pavel, a knowledge keeper of the Skokomish Nation.  "Often we are the subjects of research, but in this case, we were able to weave our considerable knowledge together with a Western scientific perspective."

Which is a polite way of saying, "we freakin' told you so."  Non-Indigenous American and European anthropologists have a long and sorry history of paying little attention to the cultural memories of Indigenous people, of dismissing their oral history as little more than a curiosity.  Time after time there's been vindication of the accuracy of these histories -- a recent example we looked at here at Skeptophilia is the tale, also from coastal tribes of the Northwest, that there'd been a monstrous earthquake and tsunami one midwinter night around three hundred years ago, which turned out to be right on the money.

Maybe the anthropologists are finally starting to take the traditions of Indigenous people more seriously.  One can only hope.

The ultimate story, though, is a sad one.  Christian missionaries in the Western Hemisphere generally did their damndest to eradicate any traces of Native beliefs and practices, especially ones that were involved in prestige and authority.  In the Northwest, that included forbidding the keeping of woolly dogs and the weaving of their fur into ceremonial garments.  Ultimately, the entire breed went extinct, and other than some woven pieces that have survived, knowledge of the practice itself died as well other than a cultural memory that it had once been done.

The men and women who contributed to the article in Science, though, by and large put a happier spin on it.  "All we knew was that the dogs were all gone, and [we had] just that -- stories," said Sto:lo Grand Chief Steven Point.  "Nobody knew what happened.  The woolly dog became a casualty of colonialism.  But the woolly dog is part of who we are, and it feels like a link to our past is being filled in.  It’s a good news story."

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The family tree of dogs

We've had both our dogs DNA tested -- purely for our own entertainment, not because we have any concern about "pure breeding" -- and both of them gave us results that were quite a shock.

First, there's Guinness, whom the rescue agency told us was a black lab/akita mix.  You can see why:

Turns out he is neither -- he's American Staffordshire terrier, husky, chow, and Dalmatian.

Then there's Rosie, who we thought sure would turn out to be fox terrier/beagle:

Once again, not even close.  She came out to be a mix of about ten different breeds in which Australian cattle dog predominates.  Not a trace of hound, which is surprising not only because of her facial features, but her temperament.  We've had hounds several times before, and they are sweet and loving... and stubborn, headstrong, and selectively deaf, all of which describe Rosie perfectly.

I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect a fifty-dollar mail-order dog DNA test to be all that reliable, mind you.  In Guinness's case, though, there are features that do make sense -- the ebullient disposition and square face of the AmStaff, and the curly tail and thick, silky undercoat of his husky/chow ancestry.  Whatever its accuracy, though, it's fascinating that any signal of ancestry at all shows up in a simple saliva test.

Especially given that just about every dog breed in existence traces back to wild dog populations in only a few thousand years.  That's an extremely short time to have any evolutionary divergence take place.  But genetic testing has become sophisticated enough that we can now retrace the steps in dog evolution -- creating a family tree of dog relationships encompassing 321 different dog breeds (including several sorts of wild dogs).

A team of geneticists led by Jeff Kidd of the University of Michigan, Jennifer R. S. Meadows of Uppsala University, and Elaine A. Ostrander of the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute did a detailed study of two thousand different DNA samples containing over forty-eight million analyzable sequences.  They identified three million SNPs -- single nucleotide polymorphisms, or "snips" -- that were characteristic of certain breeds. 

"We did an analysis to see how similar the dogs were to each other," Kidd said.  "It ended up that we could divide them into around twenty-five major groups that pretty much match up with what people would have expected based on breed origin, the dogs' type, size and coloration."

Interestingly, wild dogs and "village dogs" -- dogs that are somewhere between domesticated and feral, something you find in a lot of towns in developing countries -- have significantly more genetic diversity than domestic breeds do.  This, of course, contributes to their vigor (and, conversely, is why many "pure" dog breeds are susceptible to particular health problems).  It's also why it's so easy to identify behavioral characteristics of particular breeds, like the cheerfulness of golden retrievers, the intelligence and independent nature of huskies, and the nervousness of chihuahuas.

And the fact that if you want to partake in an exercise in frustration, try to housebreak a cocker spaniel.

If you take the time to read the original paper -- highly recommended, because it's amazingly cool -- you'll get to see the final "family tree" of dog breeds and see who's related to whom.

Now y'all'll have to excuse me, because Guinness wants to go outside and play.  I wonder what gene controls the trait of Wanting To Retrieve Tennis Balls For Hours.  Because whatever it is, I think Guinness has like fifty copies of it.

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Canine mathematics

I remember a while back reading an interesting paper that concluded that dogs have a concept of fairness and morality.

There have been a number of studies confirming this, most strikingly an investigation involving border collies.  Pairs of dogs were trained to do a task, then rewarded with doggie biscuits.  The thing was, Dog #1 was rewarded for correctly doing the task with one biscuit, and Dog #2 with two biscuits for doing the same task.

Within a few rounds, Dog #1 refused to cooperate.  "I'm not working for one biscuit when he gets two," seemed to be the logic.  So -- amazing as it seems -- at least some dogs understand fair play, and will forego getting a treat at all if another dog is getting more.

It also implies an understanding of quantity.  Now, "two is more than one" isn't exactly differential calculus, but it does suggest that dogs have at least a rudimentary numeracy.  The evolutionary advantage of a sense of quantity is obvious; if you can do a quick estimate of the number of predators chasing you, or the size of the herd of antelope you're chasing, you have a better sense of your own safety (and such decisions as when to flee, when to attack, when to hide, and so on).

Guinness, either pondering Fermat's Last Theorem or else trying to figure out how to open the kitchen door so he can swipe the cheese on the counter

But how complex dogs' numerical ability is has proven to be rather difficult to study.  Which is why I found a paper I stumbled across in Biology Letters so fascinating.

Entitled, "Canine Sense of Quantity: Evidence for Numerical Ratio-Dependent Activation in Parietotemporal Cortex," by Lauren S. Aulet, Veronica C. Chiu, Ashley Prichard, Mark Spivak, Stella F. Lourenco, and Gregory S. Berns, of Emory University, this study showed that when dogs are confronted with stimuli differing only in quantity, they process that information in the same place in their brains that we use when doing numerical approximation.

The authors write:

The approximate number system (ANS), which supports the rapid estimation of quantity, emerges early in human development and is widespread across species.  Neural evidence from both human and non-human primates suggests the parietal cortex as a primary locus of numerical estimation, but it is unclear whether the numerical competencies observed across non-primate species are subserved by similar neural mechanisms.  Moreover, because studies with non-human animals typically involve extensive training, little is known about the spontaneous numerical capacities of non-human animals.  To address these questions, we examined the neural underpinnings of number perception using awake canine functional magnetic resonance imaging.  Dogs passively viewed dot arrays that varied in ratio and, critically, received no task-relevant training or exposure prior to testing.  We found evidence of ratio-dependent activation, which is a key feature of the ANS, in canine parietotemporal cortex in the majority of dogs tested.  This finding is suggestive of a neural mechanism for quantity perception that has been conserved across mammalian evolution.

The coolest thing about this study is that they controlled for stimulus area, which was the first thing I thought of when I read about the experimental protocol.  What I mean by this is that if you keep the size of the objects the same, a greater number of them has a greater overall area, so it might be that the dogs were estimating the area taken up by the dots and not the number.  But the researchers cleverly designed the arrays so that although the number of dots varied from screen to screen, the total area they covered was the same.

And, amazing as it sounds, dogs not only had the ability to estimate the quantity of dots quickly and pick the screen with the greatest number, they were apparently doing this with the same part of their brains we use for analogous tasks.

"We went right to the source, observing the dogs' brains, to get a direct understanding of what their neurons were doing when the dogs viewed varying quantities of dots," said study lead author Lauren Aulet, in a press release in Science Daily.  "That allowed us to bypass the weaknesses of previous behavioral studies of dogs and some other species...  Part of the reason that we are able to do calculus and algebra is because we have this fundamental ability for numerosity that we share with other animals.  I'm interested in learning how we evolved that higher math ability and how these skills develop over time in individuals, starting with basic numerosity in infancy."

I wonder, though, how this would work with our dogs. As I've mentioned before, Cleo (our Shiba Inu) has the IQ of a lima bean, and even has a hard time mastering concepts like the fact that regardless how many times she lunges at her own tail, it's going to remain firmly attached to her butt.  Guinness is smarter (not that the bar was set that high), but I don't know how aware of quantity he is.  He's more of an opportunist who will take advantage of any situation that presents itself, be it a single CheezDoodle someone dropped on the floor or (as happened a while back) a half-pound of expensive French brie that was left unguarded for five minutes on the coffee table.

I doubt he worried about quantity in either case, frankly.

But the Aulet et al. study is fascinating, and clues us in that the origins of numeracy in our brains goes back a long, long way.  The most recent common ancestor between humans and dogs is on the order of eighty million years ago -- predating the extinction of the dinosaurs by fourteen million years -- so that numerical brain area must be at least that old, and is probably shared by most mammalian species.  It's a little humbling to think that a lot of the abilities we humans pride ourselves on are shared, at least on a basic level, with our near relatives.

But now y'all'll have to excuse me, because Cleo is barking like hell at something.  Maybe it's the evil UPS guy, whom she and Guinness both hate.  Maybe a squirrel farted somewhere in this time zone.  Maybe she's frustrated by the fact that she still can't quite catch her own tail.  

Or maybe she's stuck on one of her linear algebra homework problems.  You can see how that's a possibility.

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The nose knows

The first few years my wife and I were married, we had a dog named Doolin.

At least I think Doolin was a dog.  The story is that she was born to the unholy union between a border collie and a bluetick coonhound, but there's credible evidence she was an alien infiltrator from the planet K-9, sent to study humans by pretending to be a humble house pet.  My observations suggested that she was far smarter than humans but had only recently mastered pretending to be a dog.  She is, far and away, the weirdest dog I've ever met, and I've had dogs pretty much my whole life.  She figured out how to unlatch our gates (and let herself out) by watching us; we ultimately had to put carabiners on the latches to stop her from going on walkies by herself.  She valiantly attempted to herd our four cats, an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful.  Of her many odd habits, one of the funniest was that she was never without her favorite toy, a plush jack that she carried around in her mouth -- always pointing the same way.  (We tested this by taking it from her and sticking it in her mouth the other way 'round.  She dropped it, looked at us as if we'd lost our minds, and picked it up from the other direction.)

Doolin, with her jack toy sticking out of the right side of her mouth, as it obviously should be

One of Doolin's most curious traits was an extraordinary sensitivity to us, particularly to Carol.  She seemed to watch us continuously for cues about what was going on, and sensed when one of us was upset or feeling unwell.  Most strikingly, Doolin always knew when Carol was about to get a migraine.  Starting about a half-hour before the symptoms began, Doolin followed Carol around like her shadow, and if Carol sat down, Doolin smushed herself right up against her.  It got to be that Carol knew when to prep for a migraine once she saw Doolin acting weird (well, weirder than usual, which was admittedly a pretty high bar).

I used to think that people claiming their dogs had a second sense about how they (the owners) were feeling was an example of people anthropomorphizing, or at the very least, exaggerating their pets' intelligence and emotional sensitivity.  Until I had lived for a while with Doolin.

After that, a lot of the stories I'd heard began to seem a good bit more plausible.

Just this week, some research supported the contention with hard evidence.  A team of scientists in Belfast studied the responses of four dogs to breath and sweat samples from thirty-six volunteers, before and after doing a stressful exercise -- counting backwards from 9,000 by intervals of 17, without using calculators or pen and paper.  The researchers laid it on thick, telling the participants that it was very important to the study to do the counting exercise quickly and accurately.  A wrong answer got a shouted "No!", followed by being told the most recent correct response and an instruction to pick up from there.  For most of us, this would be a pretty high-stress activity, and would cause stress hormones (like cortisol and epinephrine) to pour into our bloodstreams.

And the breakdown products of those chemicals end up in our breath, sweat, and urine.  What's remarkable is that the four dogs, which had been conditioned to be able to discern between samples containing those breakdown products from ones which did not, correctly distinguished the post-stress breath and sweat samples from the pre-stress ones 93% of the time.

I know that our current dogs are pretty sensitive as well (although nowhere near the level of acuity that Doolin had).  Cleo, our Shiba Inu rescue, is really keyed in to me especially.  I had a couple of seriously high stress things happen in the last couple of months, and whenever I was really in freak-out mode, Cleo followed me around with a very worried expression on her face.  Her curly tail is like a barometer; the tighter the curl, the happier she is.  And when I was struggling, her tail was sagging.  Clearly an unhappy dog.

Cleo the Wonder Floof

So I guess all this stuff isn't our imagination.  Dogs really do sense our emotional states, not by some kind of canine telepathy, but because of plain old biochemistry coupled with an extraordinary sense of smell.

Although I wonder about Doolin.  I still think she was an alien spy, and was relaying information about us back to the Mother Ship.  Maybe the jack toy was some kind of transmitter, I dunno.

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