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The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
Bonus: Exploring Dog Cognition with Alexandra Horowitz
Claudia talks to scientist and author, Alexandra Horowitz about dogs’ cognition. They discuss everything from dogs’ sense of smell and capacity to play to how anthropomorphisms sometimes skew human understandings of what dogs are doing.
Date Recorded: 15 August 2024
Alexandra Horowitz heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, where she also teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know and four other books, most recently The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. She lives with her family of Homo sapiens, Canis familiaris, and Felis catus in New York City.
Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder is an animal studies geographer and podcast producer and host. Claudia has a PhD in Geography from Queen’s University, and her research is focused on the significance of the problematization of urban animals. She is particularly interested in multispecies urban spatial governance. Contact Claudia via email (info@theanimalturnpodcast.com) or follow her on Twitter (@ClaudiaFTowne).
Featured:
- On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz
- S2E2: Cognitive Ethology with Marc Bekoff on The Animal Turn
- Bonus: Wonder(dog) with Jules Howard on The Animal Turn.
- Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial by Frans de Waal
- What is it like to be a bat? By Thomas Nagel
- The Study That Made Rats Jump for Joy, and Then Killed Them by Christine E Webb, Peter Woodford, and Elise Huchard.
- Can dogs tell the time? By BBC.
Thank you to A.P.P.L.E for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, and Rebecca Shen for her design work. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. It can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, and Instagram Learn more about the show on our website.
Hello Alexandra, Welcome to the Animal Turn podcast. I think I'm a little bit tongue-tied because I'm a little bit starstruck, so thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
Alexandra Horowitz:It's a complete pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm delighted, delighted, delighted to talk to you today because I've read oodles of your books and I think the work you do is very exciting and I hope to one day be a writer that's as accomplished as you are, and I hope to one day be a writer that's as accomplished as you are. And my first exposure to your work was actually On Looking, and that book changed my world slightly. You know how many people I've told about On Looking and for listeners. The kind of basic premise of the book is Alexandra does walks around the block with people who are experts in various things and just how differently they see the world or interpret the world, and it was incredible. I remember that. What do you call those people again who analyze text or the fonts?
Alexandra Horowitz:Right, so the what did we call him? I mean, he was a font expert, a typographer.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm not sure if we called him that, but yeah, and that was just so fascinating that he would look at different fonts and know the history of the font and when this was in in like, in vogue and just a completely different way of seeing the world and something that I was wasn't alert to. And, of course, one of your chapters was where you laid your dog. Your dog took you around the block and it kind of alerted you to smell, and so fantastic work. Thank you for joining me on the show. Let's jump straight into it. How did you become interested in dogs, like, how have you become a household name when it comes to thinking about dogs?
Alexandra Horowitz:Those are very different questions, but first I'm going to not answer your question and say thank you very much for reading Unlooking and I think in a way Unlooking is the ethological perspective that I take with animals. It's just attention in directions, right, and you can levy that attention toward non-humans, or toward the font, the lettering or whatever it is, and there's always something rewarding. So anyway, I think it's a simple idea, but I'm so pleased to hear that it was moving and maybe a little bit transformative to you, so, thanks. So dogs, yeah, I, how did I become interested in dogs?
Alexandra Horowitz:I was a person who, like many people, had that kind of pet owners interest in dogs. Right, I had. I feel like I had maybe more sensitivity or concern about my dog's state of being than maybe my friends, as as when, as children. Um, you know, we I grew up in a place where in the evenings we let the dog uh out house, right, they just sort of could run around and would return, uh, soon or maybe by morning. You know, this was the kind of responsible dog ownership that was actually pretty typical do you mean out into a yard or like out into the city?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:they would nope out into.
Alexandra Horowitz:I lived in a kind of suburban not rural I guess, but like deeply suburban part of a foot, the foothills of Colorado, and we would let them out of the house into the neighborhood right, and yeah, and it was not unusual to do that that was not releasing our dog, that was sort of letting them run, in fact almost. You know a little bit of interest. To me now the idea was sort of a welfarist idea, just not a very well thought through one, which is that they sort of want to be dogs and not be confined all day. So we did that and I would worry about the dog, I would worry about him and what was happening. How was he safe? Once in a while he was not safe, he got injured, uh, he was hit by a car etc. But I don't think I had any special idea that this was going to evolve into that kind of sensitivity and worry for a dog I lived with as a child, was going to evolve into studying dogs in any way not in a veterinary way, not in a research way.
Alexandra Horowitz:It was only as a graduate student, where I'd entered graduate school in cognitive science with an interest in cognition and especially in non-human animal cognition, but not to study a particular animal, more just conceptually, interested in how we know the minds of nonverbal others, after looking for an animal species to study, that I came upon dogs. And it was only because I decided to study play behavior, which is a terrific topic I know you've talked to Mark Beckhoff and was reading some of his work that partially inspired it Play as an entry into understanding a little bit about the minds of others, because some play behavior is communicative, some of it requires the attention of others, and so I was looking for a playing species basically, and I lived with a dog at the time. She was called Pumpernickel and maybe after about six months of looking and sort of deciding although many animals play, they don't always play availability in front of you I was taking her out and seeing her play every day. Right, I realized that actually this might be my subject dogs and it took a while to get other people to believe that that was an okay subject to study.
Alexandra Horowitz:In fact I maybe didn't believe it, I sort of thought. I kind of took the line that other scientists had handed me, which was that they maybe weren't a serious object of study because they're domestic, maybe because they're in our houses. They're not exotic, certainly because they're not primates, and most of the animal cognition world was very interested in the big brained animals. World was very interested in the big brained animals. So there was some arguing there, but I was in a pretty liberal, progressive cognitive science community and they let me get away with it, and then I just got really interested in dogs and so that was it. I only I only studied them, simpson, so I I couldn't have predicted it so fascinating, a long answer.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No, not a long answer. I mean super, super interesting and there's so much I want to say there because I remember speaking to Jules Howard on the show because he recently wrote a book about dogs not too long ago and his was kind of charting science and how scientific ideas regarding cognition and people have thought about animal cognition were intervened upon by dogs, almost by happenstance that dogs happened to be there and how much these scientists kind of relied on dogs as, I suppose, gateways of sorts to thinking about who the actual scientific subjects were and these were lab animals et cetera, and how dogs impressed themselves on the scientists who were involved and kind of made them in some ways think differently about the subject. But somehow the dogs themselves often evaded that kind of attention which I think is so interesting. And of course we're going to talk today about cognition. But before we get into that, your comment there about letting the dogs just go into the city kind of fizzled my brain a bit there because I mean I grew up in South Africa, in Johannesburg, a big city, so the idea of doing that never crossed my mind.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But my interaction with Linus, who's my doggo here in Vienna, is so different to the relationship I had with my dogs in South Africa as a kid because we tended to have big yards and when we let our dogs out it was you let them out and they had their own like kennel or whatever in the backyard but at nighttime they slept outside, whereas Linus, he doesn't even have that. Now he's an apartment dog so he's very much confined to our space, but he has the benefits of walks, whereas in South Africa many people didn't walk their dogs, so our dogs whole lives were just our house in their back, the backyard, and obviously who I am. Now I look at that. I'm like, well, that's like that's, it's like a fishbowl in effect. We think about how small a fishbowl is for a fish and I'm like, wow, um, and yeah, it's incredible that once you start to think about their complexity, you, you just realize how deficient that is for them really.
Alexandra Horowitz:Oh, completely, and I think that's what's happened over the course of my 20 some years studying dogs is that I was really interested in them, kind of as a gateway to understanding theory of mind and non-human animals, right, and play was the way I was going to try to answer some of those questions, but then they became interesting in and of themselves, right, dog quad, dog is what interested me, but also because of the role in in our society and all these, all this noise about how we're supposed to deal with them and these baked in ideas about what's best for dogs which were coming at me suddenly. Right, I had never really paid attention to them, I just lived with dogs and everybody knows how to do that and suddenly I was realizing not only do I have to question all those assumptions I had about what's best for dogs, how you should live with dogs, who the dog is in our house, but the science that I was doing, or the ways I was starting to think about dogs, was also adding new components to, or adding a new understanding. Right, that was layered on top of this old understanding. So I feel like my entire career has been an exercise in like peeling off assumptions of my own that I was given inadvertently by society or my parents or whatever, about not just animals generally, I think that's the case, but dogs in particular, and then trying to build up again an understanding of how we should live with them. And I think that has come through partly in the process of, and partly is the motivator for a lot of the writing that I've done, that the sort of popular press writing that I've done, where I'm saying here here's the science and here are the things we've always believed and here are the ways they're at loggerheads. Let's think about how we can kind of relieve that pressure between them and resolve things.
Alexandra Horowitz:That idea of the yard dog, the dog who has a yard, was so formative and essentialist for people and I still will hear, actually, that maybe an apartment is too small for a dog. Right, yeah, it is, if you just leave them alone all day this idea that the social life of dogs is more important. I guess the third way of thinking about it is some of my colleagues now study free ranging dogs and in europe in is where they study them and that really highlights how unusual the premises we come to living with dogs are. People really think that their life must be horrible. They must you know they're strays. We even call them strays. Be horrible, they must you know, they're strays, we even call them strays, and in many countries they're just rounded up or they're exterminated.
Alexandra Horowitz:And I have some colleagues that look at them and think also they can do what they want right they don't have the, they don't suffer from the captivity of every own dog, where their lives are controlled by humans. And it started to get me to think about how do you balance that, that freedom, that ability to let them have choices and and go and run off into the night without really releasing them into the night, which is dangerous, not fair to other people and so forth.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's so complicated and hard because you know you go to, I mean, many parts of the world today still have these kind of and people still have these looser relationships with dogs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I remember being in Botswana years ago where I mean village dogs quotes, unquote where they would hang out with specific families and there would be these loose kind of connections and affinities with one another and care definitely happened in both ways but the dogs could kind of come and go when they wanted to. And I've read stories about people creating doggy doors that allow their dogs more freedom during the day to actually leave the house and come back. And there's something beautiful in that because I think you know that the dogs have chosen you really and have chosen you again and again until they haven't. But, like you say, depending on the society you exist in, that's just not feasible really for for some dogs, um, and and for some environments with the various transports and stuff. But it is just so complex and interesting once you start to compare free roaming dogs and stray dogs and you start to ask these, I think, somewhat more political questions, because it is political. Did you anticipate in going into looking at cognition that you would be entering such a political space?
Alexandra Horowitz:not in any way right. I very much viewed science I think science generally naively as a a kind of step outside of philosophically, personally based opinions about how we should live our life, how we should deal with others. Right, I thought here's this method is almost mathematical the scientific approach versus those much more subjective, subjectively imbued approaches. And, as it turns out, no, I just stepped into another very subjective field where a lot of people feel that they're being non political, but they really are being political. They're just wearing the cap of science and so, yeah, practice from. That's sort of how we're taught, what we're taught. Science is and not only is it not always, or even often, knowledge accumulating, um, it's really just more of a reflection of the, the things we value at that moment in history, in my opinion, but also our perspective or just sort of the stance we take vis-a-vis our science is so much of the result that we get.
Alexandra Horowitz:So I just don't feel like we have a grasp on the truth at all. Right, it's just another, I think, very good approach. I still want to be a scientist. I still believe in science as an approach, but the sociology of it and the politics of it are a deeply part of it, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we don't acknowledge it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, 100% I agree. I mean, I love science. I think the ability and the capacity to think through ideas in a somewhat sustained way is important, but also to acknowledge that ideas of objectivity are not always as clean as we'd like them to be, or truth, as you said. It's not always. You know, as soon as there's a truth claim, normally there's a politics or economics or something is sitting just around the corner somehow. Earlier on, you said that you found yourself throughout the course of your career trying to like peel back some of these scientific understandings of dogs while introducing potential other understandings of them. Could you give us an example of where you've felt that tension?
Alexandra Horowitz:Sure, you know, one of the first studies I did, when I really started turning toward dogs as my subject, not dogs as a way toward a conceptual understanding, was I started looking at these anthropomorphisms that people make to their dogs, of their dogs, that I make you know that everyone makes with respect to our dogs, and I just thought, well, some of those ways of talking about dogs in this case sort of about the emotional experience of dogs, could be subjected to a little bit of empirical probing.
Alexandra Horowitz:I might think that my dog feels jealous, but it's a little presumptuous of me to say that I kind of understand the emotional experience of my dog. So, um, I took one of these kinds of attributions that we make which was of the dog's guilt when they've done something wrong, I know you've had a lot, of, a lot of a lot of opinions thrown at you about this yes, absolutely, and I I accept them because I very much feel like I, cleanly, I just did a very simple, clean experiment on the guilty look on what prompts that look that makes us say, oh, that dog is guilty.
Alexandra Horowitz:They're feeling guilty because they've done something wrong. Guilty because they've done something wrong. And I'm very interested in that because when we say they're guilty, we're loading a lot into them. We're saying that they kind of understand enough about our moral code or the rules of our house, or that they can abide by those rules or violate them and appreciate how others are going to react vis-a-vis their behavior because of the moral code. I mean, it's a lot to put on them. And I'm not saying they're not, they don't have the capacity to feel like, to have a sense of morality. I'm just saying I don't know if they do.
Alexandra Horowitz:And here's a look that makes us think they do. So I just looked at what prompts that guilty look and you know I I say the same things. I say absolutely. I said many times in my life that dog feels ashamed or guilty or something of that sort. And you know I found the guilty look was prompted by the owner's feeling. What I called then the owner what I now just really call the dog's person you know, feeling that the dog had done something wrong.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the dog was reading the person more than the situation.
Alexandra Horowitz:Yes, um, and that isn't to say that sometimes the dog doesn't do something which violates the person's rules of their house, right, and then they put on this look, but usually there is the intervening person there expressing some disapproval, or about to express disapproval, or and then the dog is very responsive to them.
Alexandra Horowitz:So, so suddenly I realized all these types oh my, you know Finnegan, all these types of attributions.
Alexandra Horowitz:I would make Finnegan look so proud with that giant stick in his mouth.
Alexandra Horowitz:That was something I made with that kind of statement without even thinking it just comes out, right, we automatically anthropomorphize them, anthropomorphize them and I now felt like, oh, now I have some way to another way to look at it, which is a scientific way.
Alexandra Horowitz:Like, well, let's see when they, when he gives me that look, is it only, uh, when he has a really heavy stick in his mouth, because then he has to put his head way up and that gives him this burying of a proud dog, or is it every time he's done something which is a kind of accomplishment? You know, like, just investigate it a little bit, as opposed to make the statement and with everything that comes with it and then walk away. So the guilty look study was was fun for me and it was my first way of getting into the first time that I think I got into that territory of not just who are the dogs, but who are the dogs who we live with and how are we living with them, what kind of statements are we making about them, and are those subject to some sort of scientific tickling?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's so interesting because the more we live with specific dogs, so, linus, you know, I adopted him from a shelter. In the first six months he was with us he was a completely different dog to who he is now. But over time I've started to obviously read his body in a very different way and I know and I know that the word know here is important in the context of this conversation that he knows he's doing something he shouldn't be, not in his guilty look at me, but more in the way he slinks away to do something. So he, he diverts us. Sometimes we'll be doing and he will slink away into the kitchen because he knows there's something on the counter.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:He doesn't do the regular like walk to the kitchen where he's going to get water. He will. He will like like oil, like hug the walls and just slowly, stealthily disappear, and then we'll hear a clang and you know so, um, I mean um, and I know that the reason people push back is like, I know, linus, don't tell me anything, but but people feel strongly about these things and and I know oftentimes anthropomorphisms we maybe overstate things and we sometimes put things like shame and guilt into dogs, have you found? In general we tend to get it wrong, or is there something for this, these types of spending times? My understanding of Linus. Is there something to be said for these anthropomorphisms as well?
Alexandra Horowitz:I think that anthropomorphisms are often correct, at least to some extent Right, and for instance, in imagining that a dog is feeling jealous of another dog who's getting your attention, for instance, if Linus noses or barks or otherwise tries to get that attention back, that you might say that he feels jealous. Is that overreaching? Maybe somewhat, in that we don't know exactly what the feeling of jealousy is like for him. But certainly it's fair to call those things jealous behaviors right. And so I think this is very much a distinction that Franz DeWald made, which I agree with, which is that there are a lot of behaviors that we're identifying with our anthropomorphisms, which are sort of human-like attributions that we make, and I think that in many cases those are appropriate.
Alexandra Horowitz:Now, the thing, the part that I think is sometimes not appropriate, is the pretense that we therefore have an understanding of what the animal's experience is. So, just like another human's experience is opaque to us at some level. You know, I think the animal's experience, the non-human animal's experience, is even more opaque, and we're usually not accounting for the species difference. We're just sort of assuming that if we can recognize a behavior as being familiar, that therefore it's appropriate to assume that by analogy, that their subjective experience is the same and I feel that that's presumptuous. But of course I don't have any evidence that it is right, because that's the nature of subjective experience.
Alexandra Horowitz:You know, we haven't yet captured evidence of others' subjective experience and verified it, but I think that that's the part where I still want to push back and say, yeah, the anthropomorphism is inappropriate, but in most respects I think anthropomorphisms have been with humans for thousands and thousands of years. This is our approach to sort of understanding non-humans, whether they're animate or not, and in many cases it's a successful predictor of what comes next. You know, and that's so, I think that it's often acceptable. I don't quite take that same scientific approach of saying they're completely verboten, but I don't think that they're helpful to us in our aim of really understanding the experience of a non-human. And they get in the way of that. So I would rather interrogate them and sort of push them to the side, say this is their context, or get rid of them and try to understand the animal from their own point of view, insofar as I can, you know, as much as I can horse who learned to count and everyone was like whoa genius horse.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But actually this was a horse who had just become very proficient at realizing that people were anticipating him stomping his feet. So he would count. They thought, if I recall correctly the story, the owner of the horse would count. He would say what number do you want the horse to count to? And the crowd would say 10, and the horse would stomp his feet one, two, three and eventually, at nine, the whole crowd would tense up because the next one was 10 and the horse would make his symbol his indicator that this was the number for 10. And everyone was like wow, what a genius horse. And just because he wasn't counting the ways we understand counting doesn't mean he wasn't doing remarkable, interesting genius things. He was being incredibly alert to his environment and those around him and doing something pretty remarkable. So I guess it's kind of that not simplifying the experience and the performance and the action as well.
Alexandra Horowitz:Right, right Hans the performance and the action as well.
Alexandra Horowitz:Right, right, hans, this was the fourth Hans, or clever Hans as he's been referred to, right, yes, I do think that he was doing something phenomenal, reading just subtle relaxation in his questioner's body as indication that he got he reached the answer. Wow, that's stunning, and I think dogs are very similar insofar as they you know the guilty look is a nice example. They're reading our behavior and they've learned how to react to our behavior. They give this sort of appeasing look, which is very cute, and we respond to positively, as opposed to the negative response that we seem to be giving them. So that's a successful behavior reading demonstration by them, and we don't need to put on them this whole other idea that I think could be damaging to them in other ways. If I really thought that my dog understood you know right and wrong in exactly the same way that I do, then when he would do wrong things I should feel you know I might punish him right not me, but the sort of hypothetical me, the theoretical me, because they violated this obvious ethical code.
Alexandra Horowitz:But you know, so, as soon as you start making those assumptions, other things fall out and we start holding them to kind of human-like standards, which doesn't seem right to me. They should be held to dog standards which are not lower but just different than our standards.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, Just said a sentence and I can't help but jump in on this now. My husband will listen to this episode and I'm going to bring in a debate we've been having since January. Okay, so you are officially going to be inserted into the middle of a domestic dispute between myself and my husband about what constitutes complexity. So since and this has been like you know you have those. You know you have those discussions with friends or a significant other where it comes up every now and then and you find yourselves getting into the thick of it and then you're like, okay, okay, whatever, and you leave it and then a month later you're in exactly the same spot and you get to the same crossroads again and again. So this is one of those discussions and we had it in essence.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:He said that humans are more complex than other animals, they are more complex. And I'm like no, no, they're differently complex. And to him he said and for me the idea of more implies a hierarchy, a hierarchy, and that for me is a normative judgment. To say that something is more complex is to say it is better in some way. And he says, no, no, it's not normative, it's just there are more parts, which makes it more complex and therefore it is just more complex and he'll inevitably go to comparing something like a computer versus a toaster, he'll say is one better than the other?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No, they're different. But he'll say still, a computer is more complex. Anyway, what are your thoughts on our domestic dispute?
Alexandra Horowitz:Oh, that's so troubling. Well, I mean language. It's so hard to use language sometimes, right, it's so hard to use language sometimes, right? I think so much of what I do is disentangling the actual meaning of of what I'm saying from what I thought the meaning was. So I think, uh, I think I'm with you, you know, for the most part I think, for the most part, oliver the.
Alexandra Horowitz:I do agree. There's a different kind of complexity. On the other hand, though, I don't think that it's well. Maybe this is also pro-Claudia, but I think that to say something is more complex just comes with a lot of valuation. I don't know that I can take that valuation out of it. Even though I literally agree with him that, yeah, the computer is just more complex than the toaster, doesn't mean that computers yay, toasters boo. But when it comes to animals there's too much in the word complexity to an understanding of the animal. Mostly, we don't know about other animals, right? There's a huge amount of perceptual capacities which we apparently have very limited understanding of. A pigeon might partly navigate by magnetoreception, but we haven't found a magnetoreceptor. So who are we to say that that pigeon is more or less complex when we can't even identify exactly what kind of world they're living in? They're umwelt, right. So yeah.
Alexandra Horowitz:I guess, when it comes down to it, I'm entirely on your side. But I did see his one point about in a world without any evaluations or repercussions of our use of words.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Saying that one thing is more complex than another could be fine, but I don't think we're in that world and I also don't think we have enough knowledge about non-humans, most non-humans to say that it's really tough because you know, to his point he'll say kind of, and again, I think it comes with value judgments, that you look at humans as a species, the things we've been able to do, for example and this is always the thing that comes up the kind of superiority idea We've been able to build cities and develop philosophy and develop histories and accumulation of knowledge in this kind of way across generations. But I appreciate that. But the reason I think it's different complexities is elephants pass down knowledge through generations. They can literally feel rumbles across grounds through various. This is a complexity we can't understand. So to apply, it's differently complex. It's not more, because yeah, that's my kind of thinking.
Alexandra Horowitz:And I agree. But also, we have developed, we value history, so we develop things and then we develop a valuation which just looks at those things that we've made. And, by the way, we might also be a species which exterminates ourself, you know, faster than most species ever have. So in this kind of explosion of capacities, as we judge them, we might also have, have you know, written our apocalypse. So I'm not sure that that in the end we will come out seeming more complex after all.
Alexandra Horowitz:But I do think it's interesting because you know cognitive science and sort of the study of animal cognition which is, I think I consider myself an animal cognition researcher very much has always been looking for the things that humans have, the capacities that humans have, and, if any non-humans have them. In fact that's how I started studying dogs, right, I was looking at for theory of mind in non-human animals. How could you find it without um in a non-verbal animal? And the reason we look for something like theory of mind is I find it sort of interesting conceptually, but also because it's about we value it. We think that it's important and complex and society is built on understanding of others and we value society the way it's, the way it's constructed. So it's all of this. You know, do elephants have histories and grief and communicate in ways other than we do? Yes, but also I am very open to the possibility that the complexities of their life that are valuable to them are ones which we wouldn't even see.
Alexandra Horowitz:Yeah, are ones which we wouldn't even see. They're not just sort of our culturally provincial, culturally local ideas that we're just searching for in non-humans.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So, like our inability to see outside of ourselves and our own cultures because we're always in, we're always human Our ability to see outside of ourselves and our own cultures and societies might be preventing us from actually seeing their valuations, and there are limits, in effect, to what we can perhaps see. I don't know.
Alexandra Horowitz:I think so, and if the premise of my scientific investigation is let's go see if non-humans have any special human traits, I sort of already know some of the answer to my question, which is that I'm not going to find another human in a pachydermic suit. It's going to be different in some way, and so why have I already started my investigation, which was ostensibly with interest in non-humans, by saying the only interesting things are the human set of things, so let's go see if any of them is anywhere else in the animal world? I'm shooting myself in the foot.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it seems so obvious when you say it that way.
Alexandra Horowitz:It took me 25 years to even start to think this way, right?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But it's hard, it's so entrenched. So the ability to think differently is not something that's obvious to us. Right? It is a struggle to think things differently. It's not something that just is apparent, especially when I think established thoughts and ideas have said this is the way it's done, this is the way it just is, and to think differently becomes really hard.
Alexandra Horowitz:And furthermore, you might have to get a certain amount into the discipline before I start to see its parameters fully right. Like it was maybe harder for me to see that from outside as I'm learning to become the scientist, the researcher, I'm just trying to understand what it is to be that and then to do it, to enact it, and then you start to see, you know the fraying at the edges, but it takes. But only from within it have I been able to see that. So that process is interesting. You know that's also something I wouldn't have anticipated.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So something I probably should have asked you half an hour ago is if we were to define cognition, you know, and things like theory of mind, what is cognition? When we say cognition, like, what is it we're actually talking about?
Alexandra Horowitz:Yeah, I mean animal cognition, we're talking about thinking right Representations, and it includes a number of types of mental capacities, so it's like problem solving. Reflections, memories, things that might be exemplified in behavior but are either the causes of behavior or exist separately from the behavior that they cause. I guess that's how I describe it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Is it always attached to the senses? I guess so, like cognition is the way your body processes ideas. In point of fact, could you be a cognitive agent without having any perceptual capacity? In the age of AI, that's a different kind of question.
Alexandra Horowitz:I mean maybe, yeah, maybe so, right Before embodied agents. I think that yeah, it's caught up in perception and it's usually reflected. Cognition is reflected in action, but not always reflected in action.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And in terms of thinking about dogs now, dogs' cognition and the ways in which they are remarkable in and of themselves, dogs as dogs, I know a key thing you've often focused on is play, which you mentioned at the beginning of it, and smell. Could you maybe walk us through some, give us some ideas on how dog's cognition is attached to and shows itself through things like play and smell?
Alexandra Horowitz:Great, sure. Well, so I did become very interested in smell because it seems to be their primary or one of their primary sensory modalities, which is to say it's simply the way they see the world right there, direct their nose towards something, their eyes are often also directed toward that thing and we as visual creatures very much see them as seeing, which they'd also do. Their sight is fine, but we miss entirely their olfactory experience in that, even in that glance of them. So I think they define the world via smells, right, they're tracking smells all the time, they're attentive to smells. They recognize us by smell, they recognize each other by smells. They communicate with each other not only, but with smells, and thus one you know their olfactory. If you want to get neurological, neurological about it, their olfactory lobe is much larger relative to the size of their brain than than ours is relative to the size of ours, and all the peripheral equipment in their nose is is quantitatively enormous compared to our external peripheral equipment for olfaction. So their way of seeing is olfaction.
Alexandra Horowitz:So I think you have to understand a little bit about olfaction to get to their cognition. So a lot of our studies are little studies. That we do are about just presenting them with different olfactory stimuli and seeing if they discriminate them, if they can associate them with their source, for instance. But I still really don't understand that much about living in an olfactory world, so I feel like that's a learning curve for me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's kind of mind boggling, sorry, sorry, it's kind of mind boggling to just think about, sorry, it's kind of mind-boggling to just think about the world through smell.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I remember, you know, it's like Nagel's essay of you know how he said trying to think like a bat or understand a bat's experience seems impossible.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think it's still possible to strive for attempts at understanding a bat's experience or a dog's experience. But I remember reading when you said dog's sense of smell is their primary sense and maybe they'll confirm something with sight or with their mouth, right, but they'll often something that'll direct them is genuinely, and oftentimes their nose, and it's just trying to understand, like a mental map, to see with smell what that must be, like the differences of colors we see, or like even think about a dragonfly. A dragonfly can see so many more colors than we can see and it just like boggles my mind that there is more than what I'm capable of, like, I don't know how to think about that, but smell it's just, it seems so absolutely confounding the idea that they can perceive their world. And didn't you give a stat somewhere that it's like one part mustard to 1,000 part hot dog and the dog can still smell mustard, which is just remarkable, remarkable.
Alexandra Horowitz:You know, I think what's so great about trying to make the leap from, you know, vision to olfaction is that. And what I think has made it interesting or helpful for me is to try to think about how they exist in time right and and I think they exist differently in time right it's one's a chemical sense and one is not. I mean, there is a chemical process in the, in vision, but mostly it's light hitting our eyes and our eyes processing it, you know, at the speed of light, the speed of the neural activity. Olfaction, like taste, right, Like you only taste something when it sort of comes into your mouth or you imagine it. You don't, you aren't tasting the world right now, right, Although there are, of course, animals who are sort of tasting. They're aquatic animals who are sort of tasting all the time.
Alexandra Horowitz:So that chemical sense something has to get into the nose in order to be smelled means that you have to kind of actively interact with the world to gather these smells, and that's the sniff.
Alexandra Horowitz:And it also means putting your body in a place where they can do the sniff, which is groundwork, and it also, yeah, yeah, and it also means that the thing you're smelling might not have just happened, right?
Alexandra Horowitz:So a scent on the ground that Linus is noticing when you leave your flat is not, it hasn't just been laid there, Maybe it was laid there, you know, from the gland of the foot of a dog who passed an hour ago.
Alexandra Horowitz:And so in detecting that at this moment, they're also kind of being made aware of something at a previous moment and there's this like looser sense of what's happening. Right For Linus, that's happening, that that dog had passed and that's his moment, right there. And then maybe he sticks his nose in the air and smells another dog he knows down the street who's you know, with the wind pushing towards Linus, whose odor is being carried on the breeze, and even before you see the dog, you can smell the dog's approach in the future, right, so that what's happening for them is going to be in sort of a. That moment is going to be looser than our visual moment. We open our eyes and here is the world. And for dogs, they have to go collect it. Collect sort of what the world is, and it will also represent things that happened in an active past or are upcoming right.
Alexandra Horowitz:So it seems to me that thinking about that, how perception can change your sense of time or even space, your sense of time or even space, uh, that helped me to try to understand nagel's right. I don't know if I'm getting into the. You know what it's like to be a dog exactly, but I I think that those types of shifts you know out of my anthropocentric visual perspective, are part of inclining toward that dog's point of view.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I remember watching I think it was a BBC documentary ages ago where, in essence, there was someone who stayed at home and someone who left to go to work every day and without, like dogs, don't read to the clock, but at the specific time of day every day, dog would get up on the couch and look outside the window, because the person who was coming home had a pretty regular routine, would come home at exactly the same time every day and, in effect, the scientists involved in that ended up realizing that it was the smell, it was the fade of the smell throughout the day that when the smell reached a particular threshold or decrease, the dog knew oh, it's this time of day, so that's a time perception.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's an understanding that something is moving and happening across time, which is so they can tell the time. The same way we maybe used stars visually at some point, or the sun, et cetera, to tell the time as it moved across the sky, they're using smell to figure out temporal understandings of their world, which is just incredible, because mornings and stuff do also have different smells, I think, even to us. We can smell the difference rain just before it comes or just after it comes, or summer, a hot summer day or a winter, the crisp of they've got different smells. We just can't. There's something pleasurable in those smells, but we don't. I guess we don't envelop them in the same. It's the same, anywhere near the same extent as dogs do.
Alexandra Horowitz:We do have a lot of capacity that is underused, I have to say, and part of my not entirely scientific but more, I guess, experimental approach to understanding the dog's point of view is to, yeah, to have just gone and smelled things a lot more closely and a lot more often and paid attention to smells in my own life. Right, I smell my friends, I kind of can recognize my friends now.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:These are close friends. Wow, these are close friends.
Alexandra Horowitz:Now I mean, yeah, let's say, let's say, and I think the thing is again, it comes to what the society values and we don't value smelling as much as we value. But I think that's changed a little with COVID, because, because many people lost their sense of smell temporarily or even permanently, and then suddenly remarked on what a loss it was, as and I completely understand it would be a huge loss be most willing to lose out of all of the senses. But we, we do have, we we actually do smell a lot more than we think we're just not bringing our conscious attention to it.
Alexandra Horowitz:And when you start to, you see how layered this capacity is and and how and also, by the way, also very pleasurable for us. Right, we do associate smells in many respects with people we love and with memories, fond memories, much more often than distasteful memories more. But you know, freud thought very much that civilization was made by our becoming bipedal and our getting our noses out of things right, and that there's something very, you know, western civilization like about not smelling um, and I think that that's a mistake that we should try to undo as quickly as we can. And the side effect maybe we'll have a better understanding of the dog's world. It's so interesting.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It makes me think, if it's part of the kind of sanitized revolution that happened in cities, right, like cities used to also be smelly places, I think smells were a lot more present.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But obviously towards the end of the 19th century, as bacteriology started to emerge and different scientific understandings of health emerged, um, you know, smells were always associated with disease and and in various ways historically. So I think I mean I'd love to do a season just focused on on smell, because I think when you just focus on these, a whole different kind of history and dynamics open up. But of course the cities became more sanitized spaces and smells became, I think, associated with disease or even like working class, et cetera. The more smelly it was, the more negative it was, and only, I think, valued smells were cultivated smells, roses, perfumes, smell is even from a human standpoint. It's got an incredible dynamism to it in our social worlds that again, we perhaps don't give the attention to. So sorry, I interrupted you there when you were about to get into play and dogs, kind of what it tells us about their cognition when it comes to dogs and play what it tells us about their cognition when it comes to dogs and play.
Alexandra Horowitz:Well, I was studying play in order to better understand how they used their communications with each other, and play is just a context in which, because it's very high paced, this sort of rough and tumble play or chasing play, and because you use in play a lot of behaviors that are used in non-play and have serious meanings, like biting or tackling or jumping on, and often antagonistic, are antagonistic in those ways. You sort of have to frame the play with a statement, a mutual understanding that this is that everything that happens within this doesn't have the meaning it's meant that it doesn't in the rest of our lives, right? So everything happens after. This play signal is untrue, it's playful, and we do the same, right, if you might have wrestling play with a parent, might have wrestling play with with, uh, a parent might have wrestling play with a child, but if the parent just tackles the child without establishing that it's play, it's a very different thing, right, and so you'll have some explaining. Yeah, exactly, uh, the police are going to come around, so the so, so we frame it, and so my interest was in these framing communications, play signals, how they were used, um, because they are widely used in in in animal play and in dog play, um, and what I was particularly interested in is not just the fact they had a communication which is one of those things animal cognition researchers have learned and that we've all now understand and take for granted that other animals communicate but sort of whether they're using that communication intentionally, sort of with the other animal's mind in mind. And intentional communication we were still restricting to, you know, mostly humans. Because the peacock might, you know, fan its beautiful tail, but if it's just strutting around doing that with no other peacocks around, it doesn't seem like a very intentional or meaningful communication. It just feels like something that evolution has prompted the peacock to do.
Alexandra Horowitz:And so, in this high speed environment, I was interested how to play signals, how are they wielded? Are they wielded with the attention of the other player in mind? And so that's what I looked at their use of attention getters and these communications and the attention of the other dogs, and I found that they were using attention getters to get attention of another dog and then using a play signal to communicate with them so you might have a pause in play. One dog gets interested in something in the distance. The first dog, if they want to resume play, could just do a play signal like hey, a play bow or a play slap or running at the other dog with their mouth open, you know, as a gesture of we're starting play but the other dog is facing away. So you need to do an attention getter before that.
Alexandra Horowitz:And I found that they were meaningfully doing them in that order, that they only did play signals toward attentive audiences, and to me what that said was that in this very high paced activity we're getting a reflection of what they're thinking about other dogs. And the fact is that they're thinking about the attention of other dogs all the time, just as we think about attention in our communication dogs all the time, just as we think about attention in our communication. You wait till I come on to Zencaster before talking. You're not just talking because it's the time we signed up to talk, and should I get distracted and I'm talking to somebody else, you would use certain attention getters to bring my attention back. And so I very much see an analog in this high-paced dog activity of play and of course, your way of getting this information was pretty remarkable.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You watched hours and hours of you taped dogs playing and then you slowed it down and you watched second by second. Because that's happening at such a fast pace Oftentimes and I think this is something remarkable in your work is that you draw attention to how quickly dogs are gathering details and attention, and it's oftentimes, I think, faster than our perception allows for. And so amongst themselves they're doing all sorts of things that just we're not even picking up on the attention getters or we're simplifying because we're just not necessarily operating at the same pace as them there. And of course we are very good at picking up signals, facial features amongst ourselves and amongst dogs. You know recognizing if someone we don't always get it right. You know thinking something is not quite right here or the dodgy feeling in your stomach or something.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think these are oftentimes mechanisms that we've figured out of reading one another that we maybe can't articulate, that's working at a faster pace than we can necessarily articulate or process. And of course you're the expert. So correct me, I'm just like waffling here, but I imagine dogs are doing this at just such a fast pace that we don't always we maybe intervene at a wrong time, or we maybe don't quite comprehend what's going on, and sometimes we get in the way of what's actually a really intricate communication happening, where dogs understand each other's intent but we don't, so we get in the way.
Alexandra Horowitz:Oh, you're so right. And this is where the research immediately collides with dog ownership, with the fact that we're usually in control of and maybe even have the dog at the other end of a leash. We're controlling their behavior in some respects and because we don't see the intricate dance that might underlie an interaction, we prophylactically pull them away, right. Or we also, you know, have words to describe play. I've even in my lab, in studying play, I will have researchers who say, oh, they're fighting, right, and if it's not played, then they see a fight right away. And we're very quick to make those judgments about play and fight and then that's sort of all we see, right, and it's almost never going to be that simple. And so in making just kind of an immediate judgment, we're restricted in seeing what's more complicated underneath.
Alexandra Horowitz:Yeah, so you know, that's why I think I've been able to write about the science effectively is that the science gets immediately translated. You know, I'll be thinking about, I'll be studying something. We're studying a behavior, very foundational behavior in dogs in my lab. We're writing up a paper now and I'll be thinking about what we're writing out and I walk out my door and there's a dog doing that behavior right, right outside the door, right. So that's a very privileged position that I'm in, that I can be, I see my subject everywhere and I'm very interested in talking about how the scientists will look at it and how I look at it as a dog person.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So and of course the lab. I feel like the lab experiments are all like voluntary. You know, these are. These are, uh, your, your, what was it called the dog cognition lab? Right, you work with people and their dogs. It it's all voluntary kind of it's a lab setup, but it's a voluntary lab setup, right.
Alexandra Horowitz:Yeah, a lot of our studies are not even in the lab, which is a room. The lab is kind of a theoretical lab where we're just interested in studying something about dogs, and it might be in a natural setting, outdoors, among other dogs, or even in a person's home, or it might be that it's easier for them to come to this little office, which we've outfitted with nothing but what we need for our study, and people come with their dogs, participate in a little study and then they leave with, you know, a dog toy, right so you do such great work.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's. It's been so great talking to you, but why don't I give you a chance to read the quotes that you've, that you've got for us today?
Alexandra Horowitz:oh yeah, um, thank you for for allowing our conversation to be so wide-ranging. It's been so good.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I really I really think I could just keep talking to you, but I need to be respectful and mindful of time, so yeah, it's all about time.
Alexandra Horowitz:So I'm very interested in as I've been talking about this sort of role of the scientist and there's this wonderful paper that came out a few years ago that Christine Webb, peter Woodford and Elise Huchard wrote, and you might know it. It's called the study that made rats jump for joy and then killed them and they. It's really a commentary about research where well I'll describe, I'll use their words to describe a little bit what happened. In their innovative experimental setup, researchers trained rats to participate in an elaborate role play game to hide, take cover in one of several locations and wait there until being found by the experimenter, and seek, search for hidden experimenters until finding them. Not only did rats rapidly learn to play and switch between both roles, they appeared to find the game intrinsically rewarding. And then they later say they described the rats jumping for joy the word they use the German researchers is Freuden sprung upon reunion with experimenters. And then Webb and her co-authors point out that in the same study they also endeavored to study the neural underpinnings of the striking hide and seek behavior by surgically implanting tetrodes in the rats' brains. At the conclusion of the experiment, rats were anesthetized so that tetra positions could be demarcated and eventually received an overdose of the anesthetic before being transcardially perfused. So they were killed, so we could look at the brain activity of their pleasure in the game of hide and seek.
Alexandra Horowitz:What I was thinking of is highlighting this, just this little sentence, these two sentences here. When scientists remain silent on the paradoxes generated by our increasing knowledge of animal agency and subjectivity, they do not adopt a neutral stance, but rather widen the gap between the current state of knowledge and animal treatment. More specifically, by not openly acknowledging this dissonance, these scientists actually engage in an antagonistic manner toward efforts to marry evidence with legislative or political change for rodents. Oh, what a powerful quote commentary that they've made on what I think is not just about these, this particular paper and this particular study, but, um, the political aspect is, as we've been talking a lot about, about being a scientist and our often lack of reflection, um, on our practice and on our subjects and, uh, uh, you know, the human ego.
Alexandra Horowitz:I think that drives a lot more of our work than maybe we would like to admit.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's remarkable and I think it's their focus on rats. I know today's episode is primarily focused on dogs and dog cognition, but it just goes to show, you know, rats are probably one of the rats and mice are one of the most studied animals in the world but rarely for them in and of themselves, for their own sake, for what it means to be a rat, what it means to be a mouse. And it just goes to show how the vision or the goggles you have on when you're asking a question or you're undertaking that analysis, as you said at the beginning, can greatly shape what kind of findings you're finding. If you're not interested in the rats, for the rat's sake, those are not the answers you're going to find and you can actually be blind to what's really fascinating and interesting in front of you to serve your own purposes. Yeah, I think it's really beautiful to bring it back Because, of course, like rats, dogs have also been subjected to numerous lab experiments in the name of science.
Alexandra Horowitz:They've been.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's awful the things that are done to animals in the pursuit of knowledge without even necessarily appreciating and it seems like an ultimate betrayal to play a game, a game that seems so innocent, hide and seek, a joyful game, and then that kind of switch to how do you go from recognizing joy and complexity and then kind of putting on this really neutral, vague, not vague, this like neutral, sterile language, as though what you've just done is objective?
Alexandra Horowitz:It's really interesting and sad, sad yeah, yeah, yeah, and I appreciate christine for for writing this, because it's also something that's difficult for scientists to talk about. Uh, to talk about our position and to be the importance of questioning what we're doing all the time. Right, and I very much think with dog science that the only reason that I do it is to understand the dogs. And then the second thing I want it to have happen is that that understanding informs how we should live with dogs, and I it's getting you know, at some point maybe I'll change my mind, but it's getting harder for me to see it to be justifiable to use animals in any other way, but to understand them, to improve their lives and our lives with them, right, I don't. So Dogs, rats, it doesn't matter no difference for me. I chose dogs. They were a convenient sample. I love to live with them, I love to know them, but rats are fabulous, olfactory creatures as well you know, and societally we've made such interesting choices, that and I think those deserve more questioning.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think what's really interesting, when you bring up perhaps animals that are really close to us or animals who are controversial, people have strong opinions about them. So maybe, as a scientist, your capacity or ability to kind of plead a neutral card becomes a lot more difficult. Right, when you're speaking about dogs or a subject that a lot of people have opinions on, and strong opinions on, you know just to say I'm doing the science or the evidence says people are not going to be very responsive and people will continue to push. So I guess when, then, if we're unable to have these conversations about animals who are so close to us or animals that we have such strong opinions on, how are we going to have these conversations about animals who are not near to us or not close to us or that we don't?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:have these perhaps closer understandings of you know, then, we do just kind of sometimes take the evidence at face value. Oh, what they've said about these animals' experiences, and of course that's to. I'm not trying to diminish the kind of arguments and debates that happen within scientific communities. This is not to paint scientists as some kind of like demonic group. Of course there's a lot of debate that happens and you're evidence of that as well, showing how debate and science can also push ideas forward. So really, really fascinating. Thank you so much for the quotes and for talking with me today. What are you currently working on? And if people want to learn more about your work with dogs and the Dog Cogn dog cognition lab, how can they do that?
Alexandra Horowitz:we have a website, dogcognitioncom, and, and if you're in or around new york city you can come and visit us at barnard, um. And every year we're doing new studies. Right now, actually, we're in the middle of a study looking at dogs' recognition of emotions of conspecifics other dogs by smell, because I'm always trying to probe, you know what their olfactory experience is like. So we're seeing if they kind of distinguish the smell of emotions of other dogs. And that's a study where dogs just come in and smell a few things and we know what they do and then they leave.
Alexandra Horowitz:About every year we do something new. I'm sure we'll do some naturalistic experiments. This last year we were studying shaking behavior in dogs to see when they, when they shake, what valence it has for them and what happens before after they shake the sort of wet dog shake and that was a lot of fun and very informative. So we welcome people coming by with their dogs. If we're running a study or just you know, looking at what we've done online and I'm writing about non-human animals as well, so hopefully I'll have another book out there for people to read in another year year plus wow, amazing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It sounds so great and just.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I hate to do this right at the end, but just as you were speaking about dog cognition, um and this is a big political question, I'm sorry to throw it in right here in the the tail end, but do you think you know you're speaking about how dogs and their capacity to smell others, and that you're doing the study now, and it made me think about cows and how there's a lot of this.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:There's a lot of science that seems to understand agricultural animals right, like understands that cows can smell fear and conspecifics in their urine, for example, and a lot of this has come from agricultural sciences. So actually there are some animals where we, I think, know a fair bit about their cognition. But again, putting on perhaps a different lens, like an economic lens, is that a fair assessment? Like, do we actually have a solid or better grasp on other domesticated animals like cows and pigs and chickens? Or, you know, I'm sure there's still a great deal more for us to do there, but because of agriculture and economic interests, have we found that we actually know a lot more about them?
Alexandra Horowitz:In some cases. Yes, there's especially, you know, in Europe especially, there's been a lot of applied animal welfare science where people are looking at farmed animals in particular and asking these really interesting questions because it hasn't been under the umbrella of cognition and dogs are not typically farmed animals, they haven't. The same methods are often not applied to dogs, right, the sort of the study of dog cognition just grew up under another bailiwick. It was sort of under the umbrella of comparative psychology really, and so the kinds of questions we asked were more comparative psychological ones. But yeah, often, you know, insofar as there are questions about their emotional health which might lead to their sort of well-being or a greater or lesser cost for a farmer, sometimes there have been questions asked and answered about farmed animals that haven't yet been asked about our pet animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So interesting. Another conversation for another day. Thank you so much, alexandra, for joining me today. It's been a delight talking to you, thank you, thank you so much, and I look forward to the next book.
Alexandra Horowitz:Thank you so much, Claudia.
