(E.B.W.) Critter Corner

Feature:

You’ll Go Far, My Pet

“Not to brag, but we may have a little genius on our hands. Our 6-month-old is up before dawn playing brain games…

I am talking, of course, about our dog.

…within hours of adopting our fuzzy, adorable Pi, I sensed that being a pet parent today…means cultivating intelligence, manners, & communication skills the way the parent of say, a small human might…

A doggie tick-tack-toe puzzle from Petco encourages ‘problem solving’ & increases ‘eye-paw-mouth coordination…

A new dog is nothing if not a mystery shrouded in fur. What exactly was lurking behind Pi’s smoky eyes?...

For answers, I turned to Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist…Last year, he started Dognition, a Web-based testing service that offers a series of rigorous at-home video experiments to evaluate your dog’s cognitive skills. The results are fed into a database with tens of thousands of dogs to determine one of 9 personality types: Socialite, maverick, renaissance dog, & so on.

‘People want to get inside the heads of their dogs, & after 40,000 years of living alongside them, science is finally helping us do it,’ Hare said…

In the last decade…we have learned more about how dogs think than in the last century…his own research shows that dogs read our gestures, like pointing, more flexibility than any other animal.

Other investigators from Hungary, using functional MRI, recently announced the canine brain was sensitive to cues of emotion in human voices. When you pet a dog, another study concluded, both human & canine oxytocin levels increase…

Julie Hecht finds her bliss in canine urine. She is a researcher with the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College…& writes the amusing Dog Spies blog on Scientific American’s website.

…A decade of influential research conducted in conjunction with the Family Dog Project at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, where Hecht put together her master’s thesis, suggests that ‘dogs show very similar responses to what you see with infants up until toddlers around the age of 2,’ she said…

It’s true that dogs everywhere are doing things that would have been unimaginable in the Alpo era. Last year, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Working Dog Center trained a team of shepherds & retrievers to sniff out lab samples containing ovarian cancer. Scent hounds are also being used to forecast epileptic seizures & potentially life-threatening infections.

A black Labrador from the St. Sugar Cancer-Sniffing Dog Training Center in Chiba, Japan, was accurate 98% of the time in picking up early-stage signs of colon cancer. As Hare…said, ‘I will take a dog smelling my breath over a colonoscopy any day of the week, even if it’s just an experiment.’

As for our own puppy experiment, results are adding up.

The DNA test reported that Pi is a Great Pyrenees-Border collie mix, which means her forebears may have mingled with French aristocracy…”

David Hochman

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Montreal Gazette

May 17/2014