What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund

Date: 2025-04-28 | Duration: 02:05:23

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Transcript

0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life. I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stamford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Karolina Westland. Dr. Karolina Westland is an animal ethologist and expert in animal behavior. Dr. Dr. Wesland and I discussed the relationship between humans and domesticated animals with a focus on the evidence-based protocols for optimizing the mental and physical

0:30 health of our pets. Dr. Weslin explains the best way to interact with our animals. Now, we may assume that the way we pet our animals and exercise them and feed them makes them truly happy. But, as she points out, many of the things that people assume turn out to be false when it comes to our pets and their fundamental drives. She teaches us the very basic but powerful things that we can do to satisfy those drives both for the animals sake of course and to better our relationship with them. We also discuss the unique neurological and physiological requirements of different

1:00 dog breeds. That’s a fascinating conversation that stems from their lineage from wolves and we’ll tell you whether or not your particular breed, even if it’s a mut should be exercised in a particular way, whether or not it needs additional forms of stimulation that you’re not currently giving it and so on. And because we both realize there are also cat owners out there too, we discuss the often misunderstood communication signals and social needs of cats. As you may know, there is a tremendous amount of debate out there about the best training and practices for taking care of our dogs and other

1:30 animals. And so much of that is grounded in speculation and training outcomes, which of course are important. The conversation today with Dr. for Westland approaches animal health and welfare through the lens of ethology and the species that our pets evolved from to provide actionable protocols that are grounded in science and that you can implement right away to improve your pet’s well-being. So, if you’re a pet owner, this episode is going to be of immense value to you. If you’re not a pet owner, you’ll still learn a ton about animal biology and psychology, including yours. Before we begin, I’d

2:00 like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zerocost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Karolina Westland. Dr. Karolina Westland, welcome. Thank you. I’m super excited for this conversation. Yeah, me too. Can barely contain myself. I think we have so much to learn from animals and I

2:30 think we have so much to learn from our relationship to animals. I also believe that we have all sorts of ideas about what animals experience, what they think about us, the relationship that we think we have with them. Oh yeah. Today you’re going to set the record straight. To start off, could you just briefly list off some of the species of animals that your students have worked with and studied? Most of my students are like guardians of animals. So they’re like dog owners or horse trainers or they

3:00 might be veterinarians. Some of them work uh in a zoo as a zookeeper or animal trainer and so on. So my students are really diverse and their their knowledge levels is also really diverse from the sort of person who has their first dog at the age of 40 to somebody who’s been training animals for 30 years. I grew up around a few horse people. Ah uh my first girlfriend had a horse and it was remarkable to me

3:30 to see and to um get some just external understanding of the relationship between human and animal through observing that I think of of all the relationships between animals and humans the horse human relationship seems to be the one where there’s the most amount of physical contact right you ride a horse um uh you learn to read the horse’s uh

4:00 intentions. It learns to read yours through these subtle, you know, squeezing of the legs or you kicking or not kicking hard, but you know, um like just like a nudge of the heel. Um just a slight tug on the reins. It’s really remarkable. Um what does the horse experience the world as? We I I’ve heard before that, you know, they sort of have these orbs of of awareness around them and that they’re paying attention to things on the horizon that they’re um clearly

4:30 paying attention to things very up close to their body. But if you were to put us into the mind of a horse uh as best you can, how does the horse experience the world as an wild horse and with a rider on its back trying to steer it in a particular direction at a particular speed? As an ethologist, I I tend to take a step back and look at sort of u the the species in general. And horses are prey animals. They are also herd animals. And

5:00 I think that um we as humans, we tend to not really understand how different animal species can be from ourselves in how they perceive the world and what’s important to them. Uh so horses being prey animals means that they’re usually quite vigilant. So they’re paying a lot of attention to the world and they have this the vis their visual field is really big so they can sort of see what’s happening back there. The issue I have with how we raise and keep horses

5:30 today as an ethologist and sort of looking at how animals live their lives in the wild is that we keep them in a way that sort of challenges them in several aspects of that. So we tend to separate them quite early from their mom even though in the wild they would stay for a very long time. So I think some of the concerns that I have as an ethologist with how we raise horses is the the the early weaning that we sometimes see and also single housing for a species that’s um an aggregating

6:00 species and also that they uh in the wild they will forage up to 16 hours a day. And when we bring them into captivity, we typically feed them in the way that promotes very quick eating, you know, for just a fraction of that time. And that can then lead to problem behavior. So, so for me, I think horses are probably one of the captive animal species where for many individual horses, the

6:30 type of life that we’re offering is really not that great. Interesting. Dogs I know are very uh smelloriented. They experience the world um perhaps largely but certainly uh quite a bit through their noses. Um they can sense odor and set a distance and certainly up close. They like to get their nose right into things and and and sniff get deep

7:00 sniffs. Um and they’re always collecting information with their noses. There’s a huge range of dog breeds and I think any discussion about dogs requires that we uh first kind of separate out some of the major differences um at least in terms of the the purebred versions of them. When I see a mastiff versus a chihuahua uh versus a like a scent hound, I’m looking at to me what appear to be very different animals. Is it true that

7:30 certain dogs rely on their sense of smell far more than others? And if so, um, do the ones that rely on their on their nose just not pay attention to what they’re looking at unless you insist. I mean, the the other version of this question is how should we interact with dogs differently depending on what breed of dog they are? Yeah. So, I think I can’t really answer the first part of that question. I don’t know the extent to which uh different dog breeds uh their their sensory capabilities, how

8:00 how much that differs between different dog breeds. However, um how to interact with different dog breeds. I think that’s really a really interesting question because so during the process of domestication and and in just the last couple of hundred years really we started selecting for different capabilities in the different dog um dogs that that we needed for different tasks essentially. So, if we look at a a

8:30 wolf hunting sequence, what they’ll do is they’ll do an orient response where they they sniff and they they’re sort of looking for a uh prey and then they will do some eyeing and stalking behavior. So, they’ll focus and they’ll do stalking and then they’ll do chasing and then they’ll do a grab bite, a killing bite, then they’ll dissect and then they’ll eat the prey. So we have this whole predatory sequence that we see in wolves. And what happened during the process of domestication was that we

9:00 sort of selected for certain aspects of that sequence in different breeds. So we’ll have the the sniffers, the hounds that are really great at and I I guess maybe that answers your first question. I think that probably all dog breeds enjoy sniffing. It’s one of the big things that people are exploring a lot new now is is nose work. But anyway, back to to the this process of domestication that and then we had the um uh the the pointers who are who who

9:30 sort of we have really um uh selected for that behavior. You know that in in a in a litter of puppies, we would select the one that was mo the most prone to do that behavior. And so over generations we really um sculpted that that uh niche so to speak. So a pointer will typically not proceed to the to the next behavior of the predatory sequence. Then we have

10:00 like the border collies who might do some chasing uh or some some um eyeing and stalking and a little bit of chase but ideally no grabbing. Then we have the pure chasers, the greyhounds for instance. And then we have the the grabbers, the uh the retrievers. And then we have the killers, the um the terriers. People I I’m assuming were anticipating you to say the pitbulls or the dobermans, but uh anyone that’s owned a terrier will know that they are

10:30 great uh ratting dogs. They were bred to to uh exterminate uh small like rodents and stuff. Yeah. Anyone who’s seen a Westy, those cute little uh West Highland Terriers, the the little white ones, they’re real cute. If if one of those hears or senses a rodent in the wall, I’ve seen one stalk one for several days, that will move along. We used to call it rat TV. The um Westy will sense where when and where the rodent is there with an absolute

11:00 fixation and if there’s any way to get into that wall and kill that rodent, it’s coming out with that rodent in its mouth. It’s remarkable. The amount of dedication is just striking and it’s all about killing that rat. Yeah. So, so we we systematically intentionally bred for that like a couple hundred years ago. And then we have the the ones that don’t show much of the predatory sequence at all that simply mostly just eat uh which are are the um what do you call them?

11:30 The ones that that um help uh livestock guardians. they they still like the sniffing. So they tend to retain the sniffing part and then specific breeds will have one or perhaps a few of the behaviors from the be from the hunting sequence. Um so I think if we want to offer uh dogs a good um a good life, we should

12:00 understand where they are on that scale. And also that the working dogs come sort of with this evolutionary backpack, their genetic backpack will will uh encourage them to really want to do that work. And then we have the also the the sort of um I think they’re sometimes referred to as toy breeds, the ones that the lap dogs who are not that interested in in any of that that working dog

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16:00 countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that’s off your Pod4 Ultra. That’s a beautiful and to me completely novel description of the breakdown of different breeds. Um, not according to the dosing of wolf versus mastiff genes, which is what some of the more reductionist um research papers on this really do. They have these charts. Uh we’ll provide a link to one that was published in Science

16:30 magazine about 10 years back that had this sort of dosing of mastiff um genes versus uh wolf genes. And um what you just described beautifully breaks down what one observes if you go to a dog park or the beach. My bulldog Mastiff Costello, he was he was a mudded bulldog. So I always say um you know no underbite. So it wasn’t disha. It was this right. So, a proper bulldog um before they inbred them so much that they have the underbite and the short

17:00 snout, the brachiophalic, the breathing issues. But he um neither stalked nor uh chased. Mhm. Nor was he interested in killing anything. He didn’t have that um sense to try and harm. Uh but he certainly liked to consume. So, he was at the end of that behavioral description. Um and what were they bred for? So, um, I’ll try and not take up too much time on this one because I want to learn from you. The original bulldog line, um, was a cross

17:30 between a mastiff, something like a mastiff, a strong, large, uh, high pain tolerance, um, and a pug, short snout. And the the gene cross there and obviously the dog geneticists weren’t thinking about specific genes. They were thinking about traits was the short snout um was great for what’s called bull baiting because that short snout provides a the kind of lever that when they bite down onto the nose of a bull, which is what they were used for. It was a pretty cruel practice. Um very hard to

18:00 shake them loose. The bull could shake them and they’re not going to shake loose. Just think about trying to pick something up with long tongs, right? The physics of this versus a clamp, right? Like a C clamp. Yeah. um the mutation that takes the pain receptors out of the face or reduces them um is close by another gene that is involved in generating the the tensile nature of the skin. So this is why they have the jowls, the folds. And you can I don’t suggest anyone do this, but Costello, I’ll just give an example.

18:30 Sometimes unfortunately, would like get a fish hook through his jaw when he was playing at the ocean or something. And he’d come up to me bleeding, smiling, you know, basically you have to take this thing out. Um, so his pain tolerance was quite high. Pain tolerance very high in the front of the animal in the face and toward the rear of the animal. you touch his back toe and it’s you know the so they have a gradient of pain receptors that runs high density in the back low density to the front. So they were bred for bull baiting. Yeah. And the original line um has been bred

19:00 out. It’s uh people who care about the bulldog breed um and bringing some more uh humane breeding practices to the bulldog because it’s a pretty brutal breed now. um have tried to re reestablish the original line which again were elbows back, no no strong underbite um as opposed to what you see now. Uh so that’s the sort of brief history on on the bulldog. Um they have to be born by cescareian because big shoulders, small hips. Anyway, um the uh the interesting thing about the bulldog, I always said, and this will take us

19:30 back to behavior, was the contract that I felt I had with my bulldog was one of he would protect me to the death. You do notice that anytime they hear a noise or anything, they’re hypervigilant. Um but if there’s no impending threat, total relaxation, the most efficient use of energy of any species. So basically it was I’ll die for you, Andrew, but unless your life is in danger, I’m not going to do anything. So So maybe we

20:00 could talk about temperament in dogs and how they experience their emotional life. It I don’t know if we can make general statements about this, but you’ve you’ve spent a lot of your uh time um thinking about the emotional life of animals. What does a dog need in order to feel calm and safe? Great question. Um yeah. So in order to feel calm and safe

20:30 um I think we perhaps we should go to the core effect space. Okay. Which I think is one of the three emotional models that I find very very useful in understanding uh and providing like a a good environment for animals so that they can thrive really. So the core effect space is is one way of of depicting or conceptualizing emotions where we have like veilance on the x-axis. So how

21:00 pleasant or unpleasant something is and we have arousal on the y- axis. So what you’re asking is how can we make animals and I’m not just not just dogs but any species. How can we put them in quadrant two of that core effect space essentially? So uh low arousal and pleasant. So where they’re relaxed and they’re feeling safe and they’re they’re sort of engaging socially with others and being sort of at ease if you will. So how do we get there? And I think that

21:30 some of the things to consider is then the absence of negative emotions. So if again if we’re in the core effect space in the in the quadrant 4 with the high arousal unpleasant states, we’ll find things like fear, uh aggression. So helping reduce that will sort of automatically help animals move to the right in the matrix. And in the lower quadrant three

22:00 with the unpleasant low arousal state where animals tend to end up if they’re sort of bored or depressed is engaging them. providing an environment that’s stimulating that they can sort of do interesting things in to help them move into the to the right side of the core effect space. Um and also to the to the top in that um the quadum one is the high arousal pleasant state but that

22:30 that would be like seeking or foraging behavior, exploration, play, sex. Um but as to your question, how do we get into uh quadrant two with with feeling safe and sort of that warm fuzzy feeling? Um so some of the things to do might be to uh if the animal enjoys it coming from you and they often have to know you in order to really appreciate it is like

23:00 tactile stimulation. so petty. Essentially, something that might interfere is that we primates, we humans are primates and we’re huggers. We tend to sort of go like this when we want to interact with an animal that we really like. And to many animals, this is restraint and really scary. Uh and so, uh the type of body contact that we offer to animals that we should consider whether they really enjoy it or not, whether they tolerate it or enjoy it.

23:30 And one way of doing that is to offer a consent test. So you might you might off your hand and scratch a little bit, ideally in a place that the animal really enjoys. So most dogs don’t enjoy having a hand on top of their head, but rather perhaps here on their neck or or the upper chest sort of. Yeah. So you might do that for a few seconds and then you remove your hand to see does the animal enjoy this and will they then reinitiate that contact or not or will they move away? And I have I have this

24:00 issue with my cat now that he is not very he doesn’t sort of enjoy petting as much as I do petting him. So I have to be really mindful that I I really offer him the chance to say no thanks. So we um might consider just touching the animal as a you calling a consent test like as a as a test and then if they move toward you then what is the pattern of of uh tactile stimulation that’s that dogs like? I’ve been reading up on this

24:30 a little bit and somebody um ran an experiment that I think is kind of interesting describing the differences between rates of petting and it basically the conclusion was that essentially they claim that all dogs um are averse to very rapid touch and but that people tend to pat um pet quickly and they they showed a beautiful example of just if one just deliberately strokes the animal very slowly the animals eyelids just start to hood and you

25:00 basically just um diffuse the tension very quickly, which I I think is interesting. You know, as humans, we think, “Oh, we want to pat the dog on its head.” And for some reason, we associate patting with fast patting or petting as a as a quick process. You’re going to scratch and pet this animal where it very well could be that all the dogs out there are just dying for some really nice slow strokes. Yeah. And I also think that that nice slow stroke if you’re sort of in a calm emotional state yourself then we might tap into another

25:30 interesting uh emotion theory which is the poly vagal theory and this concept of co-regulation. So if you’re really calm and relaxed then you’re sort of sending out these cues these um um subtle cues that other individuals are reading and picking up on. And it seems that we do that with visav also our dogs and uh certainly also horses it

26:00 seems. So that just being calm and relaxed yourself can really help relax the dog. And what you say about the fast petting or patting really makes sense to me. I know there’s one study in horses that show that that if you pat a horse, many horses find that aversive. So in other words, it’s something that they’ll work to avoid. And yet that is often how we reinfor. They do enjoy wither

26:30 scratching. So back at the nape of the the man, if you scratch them there, they’ll typically enjoy that. But I would say that that um different animals, different individuals will have these individual preferences and just trying to see what they like. And perhaps also if you if you’re offering your hands like this, they might even scoot around to show you which body part they want scratched once they learn this this uh the rules of that communication. I feel like dogs

27:00 want the part of their body scratched that uh they can’t access on their own. Yes. Like I’m yet to meet a dog that doesn’t like being scratched on its rump. Bump scratching is a big thing for many animals. Yeah. Yeah. Like like the top side of their back leg, right? Like right there. It’s got to feel so good because they can’t get to that. Um as well as underneath their rear leg, right? Like just kind of in the crook of the rear leg um with that that soft skin

27:30 there. Right. that. Um, but you know, having interacted with dogs that were more skittish versus more calm, Yeah. Um, I totally agree that different animals, regardless of breed, um, just have a completely different relationship to to touch. Yeah. And and how quickly they want to interact. I’ve heard, and I don’t know if it’s true, that for dogs, space is a big thing. Um, I don’t know if this is true. I’m

28:00 sure uh someone will um refute this, but the idea that you know if your dog runs up to you when you walk in or to you a dog runs up to you and it’s a new dog you’re just meeting and they touch you or they jump up on your shin that it’s a that it’s their attempt to dominate you like this is my space. I’m controlling you that because you wouldn’t necessarily walk up to a dog that you just met and just get right in their space without kind of them approaching you as well. What are your thoughts on this whole dominant submission thing on the basis of touch and space? That’s

28:30 like Pandora’s box there, right there. Great. I don’t have any sta, you know, stake in this. I just would like to learn and I would like people to learn so that they can have um better interactions with with and for animals. Sure. Yeah. So, first of all, I think that that actually we often do walk up to strange dogs that we never met before. We’re like, “Hi, can I pet him?” And then we start patting on on top of the animal’s head. So, I think that we do do that. And then this whole discussion about dominance is really interesting because as an

29:00 ethologist, how we define dominance is completely different from how most people define it. And I actually I looked into the encyclopedia to see how is um dominance defined there. And I find that there’s two like two lines of that definition. So one is the ethological definition of dominance and one is the sociological definition of dominance. And I think that what we’re doing often is that we’re misusing we’re we’re using the sociological definition on animals

29:30 um in a way that’s I think unfortunate because the ethological definition is about priority of access to resources. Here’s a resource. Here’s like five individuals coming up to it. There’s just one there. The dominant individual will have priority of access to that resource. the others simply have to wait or look elsewhere. Uh and this reduces the risk of sort of confrontation and aggression and all the costs associated with that. So it’s it’s

30:00 just it’s normal that animals who hang out together who are like in a stable social group will organize or or have some sort of uh dominance hierarchy within them that that allows this to take place to reduce the ris the risk of aggression. uh it tends to become exacerbated in captivity compared to uh in in wild contexts because then the animals can disperse and there’s like there’s a resource over there that they can go and get instead. But when we

30:30 house them uh and we’re offering specifically we’re offering like here’s you have two cats or three cats and here here’s the food. you’re you’re putting the animals in conflict because cats are solitary hunters. So they actually do prefer if you have several cats, you should feed them in a sort of separate locations to reduce that sort of heightened arousal that goes with that type of feeding. Okay. There’s dominance among dogs or

31:00 among dogs and other non-human animals. I’m thinking in terms of the relationship between human and dog um and touch and space. You know, I’ve heard that um the dog touches you, it thinks it owns you. I’ve heard that if you move into a space um that the dog is and it backs away, then it’s uh you know, it thinks of you as dominant. Um I’ve also heard that if the dog moves into your space very quickly, that it sees itself as kind of the leader in this uh relationship. There are a lot of

31:30 theories out there about this. And I’m realizing that all these theories about animals um must be very contentious because um they lack the language to tell us what we want to know. And so we’re always sort of guessing when we’re doing ethology. I I would not label any of those situations that you described as a dominance interaction. Actually, I would rather if the dog backs away when you confront them, I would sort of rather label that as perhaps a fearful reaction. uh not submissive as in giving

32:00 you priority of access to a resource. Typically feral dogs in the wild will form linear dominance hierarchies with regards to the access to resources and that that might shift depending on what the resource is. So it’s not like it’s is written in stone or anything. So it’s it’s like fluid and variable but there’s still typically some sort of like uh hierarchy when it comes to the priority of access to resources. Then we have

32:30 another social role which is the role as a leader and when I as an ethologist say leader I mean the one that leads that that sort of work walks first in line from one um location to another. I like to take the example of of elephants that they when they migrate, it’s typically one of the the old females, the matriarch who leads the way. She’s the leader. So, she’ll help them find she

33:00 knows where to go essentially. Um, and there’s other social roles as well. There might be the controller who is the animal who tends to initiate um a change in activity. So we see this in cows for instance that all the cows are standing up and they’re they’re grazing and then one cow the controller lies down and everybody else lies down also and they start ruminating. They will often synchronize their behavior

33:30 but they’ll follow. It’s not that one individual is sort of imposing on the others but rather they do that and the others follow suit. Interesting. Yeah. Um I have heard this that uh when you walk your dog that your dog should be next to you or behind you. Uh very few dog owners actually walk with their dog behind them. Just I live in an area that is you know uh frequented by dogs and and and uh and owners. Um it’s interesting to kind of interpret that as

34:00 a question which is if the dog walks in front does it mean that it somehow is the leader? I mean, are humans just completely wrong about all this stuff? I I think so. Great. Yeah. I think that we we carry a lot of and actually I we haven’t mentioned this, I think, but I I have very little practical experience about dogs with dogs. I haven’t lived with dogs. I haven’t trained dogs, but many of my students train dogs and I help them. So, but that also means that I don’t carry any of these sort of

34:30 assumptions that you you’re supposed to have your dog behind you or beside you then if you don’t then so um which means that I can I can look at that type of statement and go really uh because I think that that there’s a lot of learning occurring of course that you teach the dog that if you stay at my side or behind me then you know there won’t be any unpleasantness but if you pull ahead head, I’m going to yank you back. So, there’ll be an unpleasant um

35:00 uh consequence to the pulling behavior, which will then influence the animal’s choice in staying next to you. But I think we very often what we label as dominance can very often be just if we just remove that label and we look at the animals behavior, we can we can explain it in other terms. And again, I would not use for me dominance as an ethologist has to do the prior with the priority of access to resources. So along the lines of priority of access to

35:30 resources, when I got my puppy, I was taught in the dog training course that I took with him. Uh that I should eat and then he should eat. Um or that we could eat alongside one another different food. Although I confess I often fed him steak. Um if it was appropriate food for a bulldog, I fed it to him. Uh it as opposed to letting him eat before me because of this access to resources

36:00 thing. Is there any truth to that? This is taught in a lot of uh dog/owner training because a lot of dog training is actually owner owner training. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I I mean, you have to set up the situation to work for you and the animal, but again, I would not frame that in terms of of uh dominance. Dogs uh form relationships with us, but as far as I know from the ethological perspective, we have no role in a dominance hierarchy among dogs. They

36:30 know that we are different and they will respond they will learn to expect that if in this context that will happen in that context that will happen and so we can often reframe that uh from in a different learning system than than dominance. That’s a novel perspective because I think that so much of what’s out there in terms of dog/owner training is really about um not so much dominance, but really trying to establish a relationship where it’s clear that you’re the caretaker to quote unquote

37:00 make them feel safe um so that their job is very clear so they don’t feel the anxiety of needing to perform roles that perhaps are yours. This is a lot like what you hear when you hear about parent child training basically. Um, so maybe given the the sort of pattern of of your answers over the last couple of questions, I I should ask the question um, which is a really straightforward one, which is how do you think about animals? Like like what is your view of animals when you when you think about

37:30 them? I know you’re interested in their welfare and improving their well-being and um conditions, but how do you like when you see an animal? Um most people say, “Okay, well that’s a dog, that’s a horse, that’s a parrot. Um can I interact with it? Maybe I don’t want to.” Or maybe I have a phobia. Who knows? But how do you think about animals? Like what’s driving this inquiry in terms of their their emotional and their cognitive life? First of all, I think that we humans are also an animal species and that we we I I we we tend to

38:00 sort of put ourselves on a pedestal and thinking that we we are one and then animals are like this this other as if it were homogeneous which is really isn’t. So, so each animal species have their own adapt we have our own adaptations and each animal all the other animal species that we surround ourselves with with do as well. So, um I don’t know if that really answers your

38:30 question, but uh I tend to so the work I do is to sort of try to help animals live better lives with humans. And that very often starts with understanding how that animal species would live in the wild and the type of of life that they have, whether they’re a predator, whether they’re a prey animal species, uh how they process the world, the the type of information that they take in. Um so for instance, we might see a dog

39:00 who’s wagging his tail, and we might think that it’s only happy dogs that wag their tails, but actually tail wagging is seen in many different contexts. Uh, and we might think of it as a visual communication thing, but actually it could be that they’re dispersing scent. The tail wag will sort of that scent will waft over to you so you can take in information about my current emotional state. They definitely have scent glands back there. Oh yeah. Yeah.

39:30 Interesting. So, can we interpret dog wags of different types? Is there is there a way to do that? So one very interesting thing is that the dog wagging with a predominant left wag left for the dog. Left for the dog. So he’s wagging on the left hand side of his body tends to be associated with negative emotional states and on the right tends to be associated with positive emotional states. Uh and and the same cats tend to look at the world

40:00 from the the left when in a negative emotional state and from the right when in a positive emotional state. So looking from the left meaning the left eye slightly forward the head tilted. So the right eye taking in that information with this eye. So okay some people are just listening. They’re not watching so they can’t see this. So what um what Carolina is describing is if the the head is turned slightly to the side. So the left eye is forward. Yeah, that’s a um So they’re looking at the stimulus with their left eye if that stimulus is

40:30 fearinducing and and the opposite to the right hand side if it’s um more attractive to them or so this is lateralized. Interesting. And then the tail wag you said a dog wagging on the left hand side more negative right hand side and more positive. What about full sweeps? Yeah, full sweeps. And I I don’t know the details here, but certainly the type of tail wag, whether it’s sort of very low and fast or whether it’s high and and sort of stiff, will communicate

41:00 different emotional states. Do you think that over time we learn these signals without realizing that we learn these signals? Absolutely. Because we associate it with our dog being in a particular circumstance or behaving in a certain way. So studies have shown that that we humans are actually um we learn to read dogs by exposure even passive exposure just living in an environment and apparently it’s it’s if we live in a culture where dogs live close with humans we get better in reading dogs and

41:30 then in cultures where dogs don’t interact that much with humans. Um, so there’s that and there’s also this the issue that we are typically better at reading gross body language than we are at reading facial expressions. Apparently, one of the reasons being that dogs move different facial muscles when they make emotional facial expressions, they move different muscles

42:00 than what humans do. What can you tell us about the facial expressions of dogs? Well, there’s been some studies in the last couple of years that have looked at which muscles are moving when in in which contexts. So, uh so they’ll they’ll expose the dog to different types of stimula and they’ll look at they’ll film the dog and look at what what muscles are twitching, where is where is the face moving in response to these stimula. So those types of of studies have found that that you know when you when a dog is exposed

42:30 to let’s say thunder or firework sounds they will show a a certain facial configuration when uh their owner returns home after not being seen for several hours. They will show a different facial configuration and so on. So it seems that they do show facial expressions. It’s just that some of those facial expressions are it’s not the same muscles that we show in the corresponding emotional state. So that would I think bias us to misreading dogs

43:00 facial expressions uh from that perspective. But then again if we live with dogs we start we we won’t observe just the facial expression. We will observe the entire dog. And we’re often better off reading their body language than we are reading their facial expression. Even though I think that studies also show that the face is where we look first. Which behaviors in dogs uh are maintained from

43:30 interactions with other dogs uh when they interact with humans. For instance, um if uh one is going to like take a dog out on a walk and it’s familiar with the sound of the leash coming off the the hook or something like that, it’s not uncommon for a dog to go into that long full um you know, front leg stretch that people call down dog, you know, in yoga. So, um and some people will say that’s a kind of remnant of the puppy play um

44:00 kind of stance. Again, people say this stuff. people are often selfappointed dog experts. This is kind of interesting like that. And the and I’ve learned this from researching it online that the the various camps of of quote unquote dog experts disagree vehemently with each other. I mean they they write to me saying you know they’re evil, this person is cruel that you know they they blame each other of animal cruelty for different training um different training tools. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.

44:30 Um, dogs will do this uh down dog type uh movement, whatever it means, with other dogs and they’ll do it with humans. Do you think it means the same thing in those two different contexts? Most probably does. That play bow that you’re describing is what’s referred to as a meta signal for play. So, it’s typically shown in a play context. And I haven’t seen it described, but then again, I’m not a dog owner. Uh, but I haven’t seen it described in in the context of let’s go for a walk. But certainly in the play

45:00 context, um, as far as I know, dogs play a bit differently with humans than they do with other dogs, but they do enjoy playing with humans. Uh and and sometimes I think we humans have a hard time knowing whether what we’re seeing is play or aggression because there will be elements from the aggressive repertoire within a play bow. But typically what we can do then is look for what’s referred to as Mars MS. So M

45:30 being the meta signals. So those play boughs or in other species it will be other behaviors that are sort of indicating that I want to play. Uh I know chimpanzees have like 30 or 50 different meta signals for play. Um M A is for activity shift. So we will see different behaviors. They might be chasing, they might be pouncing, they might be wrestling, biting each other. Uh but you’ll see these activity shifts

46:00 and it’s not in the same order as it would be if they were truly fighting. uh M A R R is for roll reversals. So you’ll see that the the dog uh the dogs if they’re of different sizes or different um sort of stamina or how big they are or how um competent fighters they are would be that they’ll take turns winning and losing. Yeah, I’ve seen that. Yeah, because they it’s not fun playing if you lose all the time. So in order to keep playing, the bigger dog

46:30 needs to lose sometimes. So they they need to in order to to keep this interaction going uh that’s the way to do that. And the last one S is self- handicap. So the larger dog will will self-handicap themselves. You might see them doing a tugofwar and the large large dog is just standing there and holding the thing and the small dog is like pulling and and really trying to get the thing and the big dog is just standing there doing nothing. But then if a human takes over the toy and starts pulling, then the big dog will engage

47:00 and start showing more of his strength and and escalate that behavior. That’s a beautiful thing when you see animals adjusting their level of kind of vigor in play so that the play can continue. It’s very sweet. I mean, it it speaks to a bigger question, which is uh do dogs have empathy? Oh, I think so. Absolutely. I can’t say I’ve I’ve seen any studies on it, but but just uh yeah, I mean, I think I think so. Many uh dog owners are familiar with when uh we’re grieving. Um

47:30 a dog will often come closer as opposed to moving further away. Um I mean, I’ve seen some incredible moments. You know, we interpret these things, right? We anthropomorphize, but I had someone in my home years ago who was was grieving a a a death in her family and costel him and you know put a paw on her knee and it’s hard to not interpret that um as a a meaningful moment of empathy and who knows what he was experiencing. Maybe he

48:00 was experiencing distress for all I know but but it the the more pleasant interpretation is that he wanted to extend comfort. I think it makes sense from the evolutionary perspective that social animals who live in a co cohesive social group uh are good at reading each other’s uh emotional state and also uh good at sort of trying to buffer negative emotions if if it’s possible to

48:30 do that. And so I I would expect it with the any of the sort of more cognitively advanced species, I would expect some type of empathy. I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens. I started taking AG1 way back in 2012, long before I even knew what a podcast was. I started taking it and I still take it every single day because it ensures that I meet my quota for daily vitamins and minerals and it helps make

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50:30 supply of omega-3 fish oil plus a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 with your subscription. Today’s episode is also brought to us by JWV. JWV makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there’s one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light sources have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellar and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound

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51:30 jvv.com/huberman. JWV is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400offJUFproducts.Again,tha{t}^{\prime }sJWVspelledJV.com/hubermantogetupto$400 off. I’ve always been um delighted and uh curious about the fact that if two animals of the same species both receive food or a treat. It seems I don’t know

52:00 but uh it seems that they are paying attention to how much treat the other is getting. And as a sibling, I have an older sister who I get along very well with um and always have, but when we were kids, I’ll never forget like um if there was a treat like a milkshake or something, she would point out that she had slightly more than I did. Um if there was a slice of cake or something, it was as much as we would look at the

52:30 the slice of cake being served to us, we were looking to see how much uh the other one got. And this was a reflexive thing. And we’re not competitive in in any dimension really. Uh we’ve always respected each other’s strengths and and and weaknesses in in a way that’s very uh complimentary. But when it comes to treats, humans and dogs pay a lot of attention Oh yeah. to who’s getting what. Fairness. Yeah. There was this this uh experiment done on capuchin monkeys by

53:00 France Dval and his team. Um and apparently they did it and they published a paper on it and you know nobody read it and then like a decade later uh in preparation for a presentation they redid some of the experiment and and filmed it and he shared that on on the presentation. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but essentially it’s two capuchin monkeys and they’re next to one another so they can each see what the other is getting and they’re asked to do

53:30 a task like give a the researcher hands them a rock and they hand it back to the researcher and then they get a reinforcer so a treat as payment for that behavior. And so the first uh monkey uh gets a piece of cucumber and he’s happy. He eats that cucumber and then the the researcher turns towards the second um monkey and requests the same behavior, gets the same behavior and feeds that animal a

54:00 grape and capuchins uh are not too enthusiastic about cucumbers, but they really love grapes. So when she then turns back to the first monkey again and and repeats the behavior and again feeds that one a cucumber that he was happy to eat like 30 seconds ago. He actually throws a tantrum and throws it back at the researcher sort of going, I saw that you fed the other guy a grape. Uh and the audience is laughing. So it’s it’s like

54:30 I think we all recognize that situation that we we take a front to somebody else getting paid better for the same quality of work. Yeah. I’m always interested in these studies um that every few years something I didn’t know that one so thank you for sharing that where there’s something about resource allocation that’s revealed and then for every one of those there will be a study that shows for instance uh I’m not going to get the details right here but um that crows uh will um teach each other ways

55:00 to open boxes so that another one can get food even if they don’t have access to that food um just it seems like an act of altruism So we’ll see fairness. We’ll see altruism. Oh yes. And every member of a species is just trying to get the most that they possibly can even at the expense of others. It’s it’s beautiful in a way and we again have to be careful not to anthropomorphize to not assume that

55:30 members of a species are doing this because they’re benevolent. That’s a nice I like that interpretation. But maybe as you pointed out before that having a a a happy group makes for more happiness for oneself. Absolutely. I think if the if the group is doing well then everybody is better off. So there’s there’s we we used to think that there was just sort of individual selection but there is a certain amount of group selection also. The individual selection is stronger but certainly if there’s a group that

56:00 collaborates better that will do better than the group that isn’t collaborating as well. And it’s interesting you’ve mentioned a few times now the risk of anthropomorphism. And I think that the if we look at that as a sort of um a continuum from anthropomorphism which we might then define as you know thinking that animals are just the same as humans. It’s only just that they have some fur. So they’re a bit different but more or less the same. And on the other side is what we

56:30 might refer to as anthropo denial. That was a term coined also by France Dval, the one with the the capuchin experiment. Uh where where we don’t recognize that in fact there are commonalities between humans and other animal species. And I think that we in our sort of fear of anthropomorphism, we have fallen into anthropo denial. And I think that the the answer is probably somewhere in the middle that we do share

57:00 lots of commonalities with animals. I think that for instance, even though our perception of the world might be really different, how we process that information and the the types of emotional and mood um responses, the changes in mood that we get in response to the environment are very much the same. Although it will be different stimula that um that different animal species pay attention to that are more more or less

57:30 relevant to them depending on which species it is. But I think that we’ve we’ve fallen into we’ve we’ve so avoided this topic of anthropomorphism. We’ve been so afraid of it that we’ve fallen into the other trap which is sort of denying that they have anything to do with us. Let’s talk about a species that um can be divisive. Cats. Oh, my sister has cats and I don’t mind them. I can’t say I gravitate toward them, but I don’t

58:00 dislike them. You do own a cat. Y and you’re an animal ethologist. Tell us about cats from the perspective of an animal ethologist. When you look at a cat, what do you what are you looking for to tell you something about whether or not it’s a friendly cat? I mean, obviously, if it’s hair standing up on its back and it’s arching and it’s hissing, that’s obvious, but what are you looking at in the context of the way

58:30 that cats um evolved and and their species in general? M so the the common house cat that we have today as a pet um um evolved as a solitary hunter uh but that aggregates in social groups um loose social group. So they sort of hang out together but it’s not this really uh uh cohesive group and they they hunt on their own so they’ll eat on their own

59:00 also. And me as an mythologist, what I tend to do when I look at an animal species is I look at three things. I look at their social environment. So typically with cats, I would then say that they, you know, um they should if they are raised well, so they’ve had had the opportunity of spending enough time with mom, typically it should be up to 14 weeks, which I think that we we see that in Sweden nowadays. I don’t know how it is here in the US, but that seems to be uh long

59:30 enough for the animal to actually learn how to be a cat so that they don’t get too emotionally disturbed by the separation once we wean them and and sort of put them in a new environment. So, so just looking at the social bit is one thing that I do. The first thing that I do, the second thing that I do is I look at how do they get food. So again, cats are solitary hunters. So I would look into ways of and and they

60:00 as opposed to dogs, cats typically retain the whole hunting sequence. Uh sometimes the killing bite isn’t quite there, but certainly the grab bite. And the fact that some cats will if they’re it’s an outdoor cat that they might bring their prey back home is to me is simply it’s not that they want to gift you with uh their uh their kill, but rather that they feel safe in so they’re simply bringing their uh um their prey

60:30 to a place where they feel safe. So it’s not a gift. We can put that one to rest. I wouldn’t say I I would not call that a gift. I had a a girlfriend in graduate school and her cat would catch these very large mice and put them in our shoes at night. It was dreadful. Would the cat put them in the shoes or would the mice hide in the shoes? Well, they were dead when we found them. So, I’m assuming that the cat the cat would put

61:00 them in the shoes. The cat also loved to retrieve tin foil balls. Little tin foil balls. I’ve never seen a cat retrieve. Oh, yeah. Yeah. At first, I didn’t learn that. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the cat and then I developed a really close relationship with it. At least from my side, I thought it was a close relationship. Um, and he would catch mice, put them in our shoes at night while we slept. It was pretty unpleasant. You had to check your shoes in the morning. So, those weren’t gifts. I would not assume that they were gifts.

61:30 No. No. I from what I know. And cats will sort of bring back what they what they um catch to a place where they feel safe. Then they often lose interest if it’s not moving anymore. So So and if obviously if if your cat or that cat killed the mice, they had that cat had progressed to the actual killing bite. Many cats don’t do that. They only had the grab bite. So they’ll they’ll just let the the little rodent go to run

62:00 off. I’ve seen that where they’ll play with them, right? Yeah. So, so they’ll let it go and if the mouse is still, they can actually sort of escape attention because the animal the cat might grow bored and walk away. But the moment they start moving it again, then they’re they’re sort of restarting that whole um predatory sequence again. But back to your question about how to interact with cats or whether how to read them. So that would be the third thing that I’m looking at is how do the

62:30 animal species in front of me, how do they respond to perceived threat? And I’m saying perceived threat here because sometimes we are well intended. We’re like hi and we want to we want to hug them because we’re primates and they really don’t like that. So so they will respond to us as if we were a predator. And um I think that again comes down very much to the types of interaction, social interactions, the type of learning that the the animal has had

63:00 when they’re really young. So for instance, there’s a study showing that if you handle young kittens between the ages of like two and eight weeks for at least an hour a day. And and when I say handle, I just mean that sort of interact with them and and play and have them sort of on your lap. and so on. They will become very social as adults. So, they will be the type of cat that will jump up into your lap and fall asleep purring. If you interact with

63:30 that young kitten less than uh like 15 minutes a day, they won’t be fearful of humans, but they’ll be more like walking up to you and saying hi and then walking away. The aloof cat. The aloof cat. Yeah. So, so I think the early life experiences can really shape the type of temperament if you will or how sort of vigorously animals respond to changes in the environment. What is this behavior of bumping uh where the cat bumps its

64:00 head against you or your arm? Uh is it to um spread smell? Yeah, I would say that is scent marking. Yeah. So, and when they’re scent marking you Yeah. Why are they scent marking? I would think that it’s it’s like something you do in your group. You do mutual scent marking, which means that everybody in the group smells more or less the same. So, it’s a it’s a way of sort of greeting and incorporating the others in the group. So, there will be a lot of

64:30 scent exchange within uh this type of species living in a group. That would be my guess as to why they do that. So, is scent marking about territory as well? like if a cat, you know, scent marks in corners and Oh, yeah. They But that’s a different that’s typically not the because they have like multiple scent glands in the face that are and and one of them is used to scent mark sort of the inner territory and this is where they feel

65:00 really safe. And then they usually have this urine scent marking which is in the out sort of um the outskirts of the territory. And you you might see this if you if for instance you have an indoor cat and they start peeing and you bring out a piece of paper and a layout of your um your house or apartment and you start sort of putting a little ring to where you find the the P that will give you a lot of information because if if it’s a

65:30 territorial thing it will typically be at the edges of sort of at the windows or doors. If it’s a an elimination problem that the cat has sort of maybe perhaps uh it hurts when he pees. So then he learns to associate pain with going in the box and so the box starts representing painful experiences. So he will start going outside of the box. But that type of behavior will be seen in that context instead. Interesting. Um, so if your cat is urinating inside, you

66:00 know, have a an experiment to run. The use of a litter box is a pretty interesting one to me. It’s not one I spent a lot of time thinking about, but if you sort of step back and you say, “Okay, here’s this animal that we’ve domesticated. And it readily learns how to cover its waist. Um, which is very different than a dog, which can be trained to with withhold until you go out on a walk. That’s basically the two different strategies there. Um, and I

66:30 don’t know what it is if you own a monkey um or something else. But what is it about the covering of waste behavior? Is that something in cats? Is that a natural behavior they do in the wild? And if they roam, why do they bother? Is it? Um, and then sort of tacked to this is that with dogs often times after they eliminate waste, they’ll step away from it and kick dirt in the general direction. And I’ve heard it interpreted two ways. One is that

67:00 they’re trying to spread scent and the other is that they’re trying to cover waste. So again, uh, this is why I was interested in talking to an animal ethologist as opposed to a pet uh, behavioral trainer, right? I’m also interested in that. But but I think we have to again acknowledge that much of the interpretation that we have about animals behavior is just human interpretation. So certainly so what is this uh covering of waste? Do we know what it’s for in the wild in cats? The covering of waste um is a way to sort of

67:30 reduce the risk of infection. I would assume that they also don’t eliminate close to where they eat. So if we have a house a cat in our house, we shouldn’t have the litter box next to the food, which I wish I had known where I had my first cat 20 years ago because she had that very setup with the food right next to the litter box. And I would also assume that the behavior of dogs when they sort of kick at their poop typically, right? Not uh pee.

68:00 Uh that it’s a way of spreading scent. uh because if it were covering center the behavior would look very different I think. Mhm. But I haven’t seen any sort of any scientific study on that topic. Okay. So cat owners take note separate the food from the litter box by by some distance. I was always um somewhat surprised uh although less so over time uh how much determination and effort my bulldog would put into

68:30 peeing on things on walks. So I feel like it was one of his great joys in life. There I go again anthropomorphizing. But but to smell something and then pee there um he seemed to have an endless supply of urine for this. Um, it was really remarkable. Yeah. You know, as as a scientist and someone who loves dogs and loved him, you know, more than words, I just was like, “This is amazing.” Like like he loves this behavior. Yeah. And he’s also reading the pee mail from the

69:00 other dogs in the the neighborhood. So the urine tells a lot of information to the other animals. It tells what what gender, what, you know, reproductive state, perhaps also something about the animals emotional state or mental state. So I wouldn’t hesitate to say that that that was one of the joys of life for for dogs that they that’s after all that’s how they communicate. So it and they spend a lot of time doing it and they’re willing to work to get access to that uh opportunity. So AB absolutely I would I would think that it gives them positive

69:30 emotional experiences doing that. So there’s some innate drive in in dogs, it seems, to um read the emotional and hormonal states of other dogs that have been been there. It to me it it felt like their form of social media. Yeah. Yeah. Like I’m going to post here. What are other people posting here? What’s going on? Um I mean clearly there’s some brain real estate devoted to this behavior. I’m I’m I’m not being facitious. I mean I look I look at aloc

70:00 you know you look at a human brain 40% of that real estate is for vision. Mhm. Another 40% it’s mixed in there with other stuff is for motor behavior. We have neural real estate for smelling and certainly for touch. But even if you’re a massage therapist or you’re a or you do, you know, touchbased work, you’re uh even if you’re a braille reader, um the amount of neural real estate for these other things is is vastly larger except

70:30 for the blind person where the visual stuff is taken over by the tactile stuff and auditory. So amount of real estate correlates. Um so when I see a behavior that’s like this is what this is one of the main things dogs do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty striking. So dogs descended from they were domesticated from wolves correctly. Did that happen at independent locations around the earth? Don’t really know the answer to that question and but it seems that they domesticated themselves that it it was sort of wolves that started

71:00 hanging out next to human habitation and that it was sort of the the the least fearful and the sort of most uh explorative wolves that dared do this. So, so it was it was it wasn’t that we caught wolves and said, “Aha, I’m going to breed you now.” But it was rather that that was it was like a symbiotic relationship that developed over time. Interesting. I don’t know of any other species that does that except maybe uh like certain fish or dolphins

71:30 that follow fishing boats so they can get some of the catch. But that’s different because, you know, I see these Instagram videos of like an otter jump jumping on a kayak and there’s some interaction uh that’s regular. They, you know, that the person goes out on their kayak, they they interact with this otter. So, animals will do this, but usually there’s some sort of food. It just sounds like food payoff is is and safety is really the key. Does that mean that animals at at a very basic level are looking to optimize food intake and

72:00 safety? And what does that tell us about zoos? I personally have a a a pretty strong um visceral reaction to zoos that um have large carnivores. I realize we could have a discussion about elephants, too, but I feel like large carnivores housed in zoos creates some issues for me. I won’t go into what this is, but but I’m also hear that zoos have um positive uh breeding programs, endangered species

72:30 protection programs. What’s your take on zoos? When we talk about zoos, it’s perhaps good to talk about the evolution of zoos because back in the day, like 150 years ago, it used to be more or less a managerie that you know here’s a lion and here’s an elephant and here’s a zebra and they were all in little small cages and the only thing that you did was see the animal really. Zoos today tend to have the purpose of doing a lot of conservation work. So there’s

73:00 there’s um what’s referred to as INC2 conservation where you work to preserve wild habitat and creating national parks etc and sort of giving the opportunities for for reintroduction of species and so on. And there’s XC2 conservation which is then housing those uh animal species that are are threatened with extinction in an environment. And ideally that environment should then be good enough to promote uh um species

73:30 typical behavior and so on. So I’m I’m I mean I’m conflicted. I think that that many zoos are sort of doing a lot of um a lot of good in in in this effort and also educating the public and many I think that many people who go to zoos that might awaken in them an interest in animals which I think is a good thing that we that we care about

74:00 animals but also that sometimes the the the housing is isn’t optimal and certainly some species are a lot more difficult to keep in captivity compared to others. So polar bears are are really difficult to keep because they’re they’re they’re ranging p um carnivores. They walk miles and miles and miles and it’s really difficult to to provide those species specific opportunities in captivity compared to other

74:30 uh carnivores who have a more of a a different type of approach to to predation. One of the things that really turned me on to uh just how um more sophisticated um cat species are than I ever assumed was um something that happened when I was a posttock at also at Stanford. Uh I was a member of the San Francisco Zoo. The San Francisco Zoo is an outdoor zoo by comparison to

75:00 most other zoos I’ve been to and I haven’t been to that many but it’s a pretty uh nice landscape. Um there’s an outdoor lemur uh I call it an exhibit but you know indooroutdoor lemur thing that’s really amazing. There’s some giraffes all this. Well um around the time I was in when I was a posttock I just briefly tell this story. I was at the movies in San Francisco and I I stepped out to get something to drink and the the kid behind the counter said the a tiger escaped from the San

75:30 Francisco zoo and is killing people. And I thought, what? Like that’s crazy. Turns out that was only partially true. What had happened is there was a tiger there, Tatiana who um they used to have these moes around the the tiger enclosure and it was very close to Christmas. People can look this up and get the details. And there were a couple of kids who were throwing either pine cones or or throwing something at the tigers. Okay. The zoo was near shutting down.

76:00 Tatiana either ran up or jumped the moat. I don’t know how she did it. Um got out and moved through the crowd. This is the to me the interesting part. Moved through the crowd completely ignoring most of the people that were around. Centered in on and killed one of the kids. Then moved to the second kid. Worked him pretty well. the authorities showed up, killed Tatiana.

76:30 This opened up a whole discussion in the zoo community. Um, raised a lot of uh kind of complicated questions about enclosures, etc. The enclosures there, by the way, now are very different. They have these high glass as well. And of course, the ending was sad for everybody. Um, I took a break from my membership there. I reactivated a few years later. They know I don’t that tiger, you know, obviously is gone. But um I I still am conflicted about um

77:00 about this whole picture. What’s interesting to me is the intentionality of the tiger. So this was not a bloodthirsty tiger that just wanted to kill humans or eat humans. It was those two humans that pissed her off and those two humans were going to pay and they paid. The family sued the zoo and then the then it was a whole thing. I don’t know how it ended up with the law with the lawsuit, but it was a whole thing. So, people can look this up online. Um, when you hear that, that a tiger did

77:30 that as opposed to just going into a frenzy the way humans sometimes go into a frenzy, attacking whoever and as many people as possible. What do you think? What What What does it tell us about tigers and their um consciousness? I think we often don’t give animals enough credit. Uh to me it’s not surprising that that she she experienced something really unpleasant that she came to associate

78:00 with two individuals and that generated a negative emotional state and aggressive behavior that she then carried out directed towards those two people. Does it surprise you how directed it was? No. as opposed to just I mean there were plenty of people around that were an easier um you know easier kill. I would think that a fearful animal might lash out at anyone but an animal that

78:30 is angry tends to be more premeditated in a way calculated calculated in a way. So I would expect that if if you had scared the tiger, she might show defensive aggression, which is just lashing out at whoever is closest. But this was offense offensive aggression. And so that is that is premeditated. I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a Function

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80:30 currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they’re offering early access to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that’s functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function. Could we talk a little bit about the um the prey and stalking and capture and killing sequence? One of the things that um I’m always been fascinated by is when a let’s just use a cat as an example, could be large cat, could be small cat,

81:00 is in its stalking mode that it essentially gets one ballistic strike opportunity before the the before the chase is on or or the animal gets away or it gets caught, right? And we we’ll see the um we had a cat when I was a kid um that would like stalk and you know so obviously like creep up and then right before it would leap at the prey it would it would start shattering its teeth. Um

81:30 I’m assuming that was behavioral suppression or something leaking through. What what’s going on when when a animal does that very deliberate stalking that calculation um and the like teeth chatters or or like twitching is starting to occur? What is that? My guess would be perhaps some sort of sort of displacement behavior that there’s motivation to move on in the sequence of behaviors to the next behavior, but it’s not quite time yet. And so that sort of activation then gets an outlet through that

82:00 behavior. But I really don’t know. I don’t know. I haven’t seen this discussed. So, it’s almost like a like a hydraulic pressure or something building up. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Um, we’ve talked about dogs. We’ve talked about cats. Let’s talk about birds. Okay. I had parrots when I was a kid. They were domestically bred little cheek dwarf parrots. It didn’t turn out poorly. It didn’t turn out great. They they were um I didn’t clip their wings cuz I couldn’t bring myself to. and they flew around my room a lot and

82:30 around the room a lot and threw a lot of food on the ground a lot and eventually made sense to give them to somebody who had an aviary. Mhm. Um parrots are smart. Yeah. Yeah. What are parrots thinking about? I think what what all animals are thinking about where their next meal is come going to come from uh social interactions and whether there’s any threat anywhere. Is that really their like 90% of their conscious life? say I would say that um

83:00 uh if the animal doesn’t feel safe then it’s very hard to engage the animal in any type of sort of if you if an animal is fearful and you try to feed them they often won’t take food for instance. So the sense of safety has a very high priority because if you don’t feel safe you could die essentially. So if you’re in a situation where you don’t feel safe it’s because that situation is potentially dangerous. There could be predators around and then you must focus your attention on those predators because otherwise you’re going to die.

83:30 And that of course depends on the species that some species are sort of aggregate in big flocks if we’re talking birds and some are um pair bonding species. But the social environment is really important both with regards to uh uh you know um parenting behavior. So sexual behavior, parenting behavior, raising young and so on, all of that also has high priority because it’s essentially about um furthering your genes into the next

84:00 generation. Um and then uh and then foraging behaviors, where am I going to get my next meal? We feed them on a plate. We’re thinking like we we think that we’re doing them a service like here’s here’s your food on the plate. You don’t have to do anything. But they come equipped to actually show their food getting repertoire of behaviors. So typically if we don’t allow them to show those behaviors, we might see some problem behaviors popping up instead because they will redirect that that energy that um intention

84:30 into I don’t know. Did you have any problems with the animals sort of the birds you know ripping your carpet or or Oh, they destroyed everything. I mean they destroyed I mean that they took great pleasure in ripping everything books. I would cover the foraging behavior directed towards the wrong thing. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t recommend anyone own parrots frankly. That was an experiment gone wrong. Uh luckily they’re I think they’re still alive. They live a very long time. Oh. And

85:00 people can look up the Ecuadorian jay cheek uh dwarf parrots. They have this beautiful um orange under their wings. They have little gray cheeks. and they they were called pocket parrots at you know that the the excitement for me at that I was young I was probably 11 was that I’d be able to like carry them around in my pocket. They didn’t want to do that at all. Um anyway um it’s interesting to think about this need for animals to express their natural repertoire of behaviors for dog owners.

85:30 Um I think the the common practice is to you know put out a bowl of food. Uh would we be better off bringing the food to a park and and going to the park and then having them eat there? Um or somehow incorporating the the the roaming and and um prey seeeking uh behavior. I mean, how would one incorporate that into a a more uh pleasant experience for for the dog? Cuz what you’re saying makes total sense. They need to express these behaviors. They’re not if they’re if they can’t um

86:00 it’s going to come out some other way, maybe destructive to them or the environment. Yeah. Essentially, I think that for dog owners that what we can do is we can try to promote the different aspects of the predatory sequence that that particular dog in front of us enjoys doing. Uh I I mentioned nose work as being one of the things that that many dogs really enjoy. Interestingly, and this is this is just sort of the early days of scientific studies on the effects of nose work uh are really promising that that one of the effects

86:30 of nose work seems to be so if you if you’re not familiar with it, it’s essentially that the animal has learned that he needs to find a specific scent in an area. And so he sniffs the area, he roams the area, and he follows the scent, and he’ll he’ll stop and mark when he finds the scent. And then he gets a reinforcer. So he gets rewarded for for doing that. So that’s that’s essentially more or less a setup. And it seems that it helps regulate arousal so that animals who are sort of highly strong and almost uh um

87:00 have generalized anxiety get calm down and the ones that are sort of uh semi-depressed get sort of uh more um more enthusiastic about life. and and also and and um if we’re back in core effect space again we have the shift to the right hand side of the core effect space so we have positive veilance associated with that uh and it seems really interesting um early days still

87:30 because this this um dog sport is like just I don’t know 15 years old or something it’s not very not very old so essentially what we can do is we can um every dog could do nose work I think that would be an interesting sort of an an outlet for that very first part of the behavioral sequence. And then I know that some some um trainers are working specifically to to help dogs who chase wildlife for instance. And it’s about teaching the

88:00 dog to stay in the first parts of the predatory sequence to do the sniffing, the the uh the pointing and the the um the eyeing behavior and then getting reinforced for that so many times so that it becomes like a feedback loop that they they see a they see a deer running across the road and they go, “Mom, I saw a deer.” And they get reinforced for that. So, and other dogs like greyhounds that love chasing that

88:30 you allow them to do that. And then uh other dogs that really allow sort of uh um that really enjoy uh carrying things that you allow them to do that. And then give your poodle a an old um something to rip apart, you know. Is that what poodles like to do? Dismbow things. Yeah. Poodles like to do to kill and to to the post kill ripping apart. Yeah. ripping apart. Gosh, the the name and the look of a poodle suggests a much a

89:00 much more docile animal. So, they really like to rip bodies apart. Yeah, as far as I understand. Yes, that makes sense. Um, given what I understand about the dosing of different and then also I would, you know, rather than serving food on a plate, you might try scatter feeding. So, just uh or or feeding it in a way that the animal actually has to work for it. So, do some behavior like um one of these snuffle mats. You hide the food in there. So they have to actually spend some time looking for the food before consuming it because otherwise if you

89:30 serve it in a bowl the some animals simply you know they inhale it. It takes like 30 seconds and they’re done. Costello ate like a seagull. Yeah. Really? He wouldn’t chew his food. Yeah. It’s interesting. The um the the dog food uh training uh animal health world sells lots of things where you can put food inside of an object where they have to really work hard at it. I had mixed uh you know sort of mixed results with that because I I I have heard that in addition to exercise and wanting your

90:00 proximity that animals, dogs in particular perhaps really need that cognitive work that they they get bored and they really need the challenge of of working their mind. So much so that on rainy days when you like if weather’s really bad and you can’t go out that they need an immense amount of kind of like search and forage type behavior. So I would I I strive to do that. Um and I know some people might hear this and just think this is crazy like my dog

90:30 just wants to curl up at my feet and it just wants to fetch the ball. But that’s where fetching breeds. If I threw a a a ball to Costello, he would go to it and then just sit on top of it. He had no interest whatsoever in doing anything with that in terms of retrieving it. But he loved to just love to tug. So just you know if I tied a a rope to a tree for instance, he would jump on on there and hold on and I could swing him by his body weight, you know, 90 lbs and he’d stay up there for 10 minutes. Yeah. Like the the pleasure of chewing was clearly

91:00 the the strongest innate drive. So I think what I’m realizing is that understanding the sequence of natural behaviors, but also where in that sequence a particular breed really leans to. Absolutely. Yeah. So sometimes it can be hard to know where your dog is on that scale, especially if it’s like a mixed breed of some type. And then you can often actually just look at the confirmation of the dog. So those very lean uh I’m thinking greyhound now, the the lean dog with with not much muscle

91:30 and very pointy snout tends to be the chasers. And um the the ones with more muscles, front muscles and and bigger jaws tend to be the the ones that rip things apart. Bulldogs, Rottweilers, mastiffs. Yeah. And some of the smaller ones, the pugs, the French bulldogs. I think people don’t appreciate how the the breeding down because people now, you know, a lot of people have dogs who live in apartments, you know, smaller dogs. Although there’s this weird thing,

92:00 uh you know, you talk to a vet. I have a family member who’s a vet. You say, “What’s a great like apartment dog?” And they’ll say, “Great Dane because they don’t need a ton of space to roam, but you have to walk them, but they don’t need long walks compared to like a little terrier sometimes needs to just go go go. I mean, needs two hours or more of activity.” I think you need to pay a lot of attention to the type of life that you’re going to offer. Whether it’s, you know, living in an apartment in a busy city or whether it’s uh, you know, you on a farm somewhere, which which breed of dog is going to adapt

92:30 best to that lifestyle? Do you think dogs like cities? I think many dogs get very stressed in cities because of the constant bombardment of sensory information. So, there’s noise. There’s dogs. So if you’re out walking on the street, there’s constantly meeting strangers. And for many animal species, meeting strangers a doesn’t happen very often and b causes um uh an increase in

93:00 arousal because it it could be, you know, friend or foe. It could be some someone that you want to fight with. It could could be someone you want to have sex with. You need to assess the situation. And I think that that dogs are quite unique in that respect and that they have a high tolerance for strangers because many other animal species do not. And I think that we tend to forget that sometimes that we we introduce animals to to animals that they don’t know. We expect them to get along and they don’t. That that type of

93:30 introduction needs to be done really carefully. Typically we might start with um with uh just ex exchanging sense. So if you’re if you have one cat and want to get a second cat for instance, they typically won’t just accept the other the way that two dogs might do for instance. So then you might have them in different rooms and you might rub one cat with one towel and rub one the other cat with another towel and then exchange towels and then you might want to gradually incorporate other sensory

94:00 modalities too so that they’ll start hearing each other and finally that they start seeing each other and then at the end the tactile so the actual physical contact and if you do it that way you reduce the risk that they’ll actually start fighting when you do the introduction because if you just put them together they might just escalate to aggression right away. But if you do it gradually, they that exchange of information will help them sort of figure out who the other is and reduce the risk of aggression. One thing I’ve always been fascinated by and there’s a

94:30 little bit of data starting to emerge on this as to what the mechanisms might be is self versus other species recognition. most notably that dogs, unless it’s a dominance behavior, don’t try to mate with cats, for instance. They might hump, but that’s a separate thing. They’re actually separate circuits. Uh my um uh colleague David Anderson at Caltech um did a really beautiful study. Can I just The takeaway shows that there

95:00 are separate circuits in the brain for mounting behavior for sex versus mounting behavior for dominance. Oh, interesting. And the mounting behavior for dominance circuits exist in males and females of a species where only the male mounts for purposes of reproduction. So this notion of mounting as a dominance behavior is a very real thing even in mice. Um in any case setting mounting for dominance behavior aside, aka humping, it’s remarkable like a horse doesn’t try and mate with a dog.

95:30 Different species of animals seem to know self versus other. Yeah. They don’t have to learn it from their mom. Yeah. Or dad or us. It’s innate. It’s innate. Yeah. For most species. There’s actually a a few uh exceptions being uh uh what comes to mind is um uh certain water fowl birds where a female and I can’t say which species now but some species of water

96:00 bird the female recognizes the male innately but the male learns through sexual imprinting when they’re young to sort of be attracted to females that resemble the female that reared them. And essentially this this is because um in in those species the males are typically very ornamented and sort of really fabulous looking and the females are um cryptic. They’re like camouflaged. So they’ll they’re like

96:30 brown. So the males need to learn what mom looks like. And when they grow up, they’ll start um courting females that look like mom. And so if you raise such a male with the wrong species, they’ll start courting the wrong female. And of course, she won’t be interested because she he doesn’t look like the her her her golden standard of what a male of that species is supposed to look like. It’s so

97:00 interesting. As a kid who had aquaria, you can tell I’ve had a lot of different animals. Um, you know, I would I never successfully uh bred um fish in captivity. Um uh I tried to breed cuttlefish in captivity in my lab. That didn’t work. Although I successfully raised them, but I I got really into freshwater discus for a while. Okay. And tried very hard to get a breeding tank going. It’s very difficult. Um but occasionally, you know, someone in the aquarium community that I was a part of

97:30 would succeed in getting, you know, breeding between uh discus fish, but you never ever ever see an instance of like a discus fish trying to uh fertilize the eggs of a uh of a different species of fish. They just know. Yeah. And it’s got to be for them odorant or presumably mixed sensory. um is it’s really a striking aspect of even in speak but I have friends who study flies. So if they study um drosophila uh of one particular

98:00 type that the the one type of fruitly will not try to mate with another type of fruit fly and they look very similar to you and me. So there’s there’s something really powerful there that sort of um there’s imbreeding avoidance is is sort of uh a mechanism that prevents many animal species from from mating with someone who’s too genetically similar to yourself since we get this inbreeding depression. But there’s also sort of don’t don’t waste your time mating with someone that’s

98:30 like you can’t even produce offspring. However, one one other exception that came to mind was unullet. sometimes uh and I have this memory of being I was in Africa about back in 1995 um at the Chimunji Wildlife Orphanage um walking chimps into the forest to to sort of rehabilitate them and and that they had a young dyker there which is a very small like yayh high um antelope kind of

99:00 thing who had been orphaned and raised bottle raised and sexually imprinted on humans. Whoa. So he came up and started, you know, humping me more or less thinking that I was his his kind. So that type of sexual imprinting is when when predominantly I think males learn, they imprint sexually on the type of individual that raised them. So that’s

99:30 the type of individual that they will then later also try to court. I think Conrad Lawrence had a also in his one of his his books he described some sort of corvid species who he also raised from young and who started courting his uh like a secretary or someone and the interesting story there was the courting behavior in this bird is is um vomiting um you know leaving like a

100:00 present and offering food in any open surface. So or orifice. So he would try he would try to sort of get her to open her mouth and when she didn’t he would go and and and leave the present in her ear instead. Disgusting. people can offset their disgust by we’ll provide a link to the now very famous picture of con of Conrad Loren who won the Nobel Prize I believe um for uh his discoveries of about imprinting where

100:30 the geese would imprint on him. It’s him swimming in a lake with the with the trail of of baby geese behind him the glings behind him. So that’s that’s the other type of of imprinting you’re talking about. That’s filial imprinting. So there are two types. There’s the sexual imprinting where you learn who to make with and there’s the filial imprinting where you sort of learn who to feel safe with and they start following that individual which is what dogs do with us. Actually, I would say that dogs don’t imprint on humans. They grow attachment

101:00 bonds to humans. What’s the difference? So imprinting is typically a very fast process. It occurs within you know minutes or hours. attachment takes longer and involves more senses. So imprinting tends to be I think visual if I’m not mistaken perhaps alactory in some species uh and attachment has has previously mostly been studied in humans. So this bond that grows between uh caregiver and offspring. Um what’s interesting also is

101:30 that attach that attachment bond um will grow in different ways depending on how the caregiver responds to the young one’s um needs essentially. So you can have um a secure attachment bond where the caregiver is very uh reliably responds to the needs of the of the young one so that if they find themselves

102:00 alone, they can they can self-regulate better. So they can their nervous system can more easily calm down again after a stressor than if they are insecurely attached. And so it seems that dogs form rather than imprinting on humans, they form a type of attachment bond and they can also be securely or insecurely attached to their persons. that’s going to open up a whole set of ideas for

102:30 people because this whole notion of secure insecure and um and then the D-babies and the classic Bulby experiments that we’ve talked about before on this podcast where um this kind of disorganized um response is is something that is thrown around a lot nowadays in uh dating culture, relationship psychology culture like our people is he or she securely attached is he or she avoidant? Is he or she anxious attached? Guess what folks? It’s also in in your pets. So now you can start to get into that in those classic experiments of bulby just to summarize

103:00 very briefly um mother and it was typically mother although other caretakers now have been tested but mother and child are separated there’s an a a predictable understandable and healthy anxiety response that occurs. If the conditions are right the kid eventually comes to play and relax a bit. If the conditions aren’t right they don’t. That’s all healthy. But the real test is on reunion with mom. Yeah. And also how they respond to a stranger,

103:30 right? The strange situation test, right? Do they feel comforted? And how do they approach mom when mom comes back? Is it eager to see and and relaxed? Is it uncertain? Is it uh avoidant? That’s what the this test is about. Yeah. Yeah. Or clingy also. Yeah. So the same types of experiments have been done on dogs and it’s been found that certain dogs are are sort of insecurely attached. They’ll be clingy uh or or avoidant and uh or and some are

104:00 securely attached. So they’ll be sort of more explorative uh they’ll recover quicker uh from this separation. So this is great. So if people uh drop off their dog at the dog sitter when they travel and then come back, the reunion tells you a lot about how that dog feels. Yeah. Sadly, I think that that uh and and I’m not sure that I have any backup in any scientific studies here, but I suspect at least that probably early weaning predispose dogs

104:30 to insecure attachment. In this country, the typical um idea is that puppies can be separated from their mother at about 8 weeks. Uh do you feel that’s too early? Yeah. As an ethologist, sort of looking looking at how the species live in the wild, what type of social interactions they have, and how can we best provide an environment to sort of promote natural behavior. For me, 8 weeks is way too

105:00 early. So we have some studies from the I don’t know 60s or something uh where I think two researchers called Scott and Fuller did some separation studies but that that was with dogs aged like 3 four five six weeks and they found that that type of early separation was really detrimental. Sure. uh but I as far as I know there’s been very few studies done done beyond 8 weeks and of course many people would then say that okay well we

105:30 have to do all that all that socialization stuff where the animal learns to sort of accept life with humans that would then have to occur at the breeders rather than in the new uh in the new environment but actually I’m not so sure because it seems that if you have secure attachment you’re better able to self-regulate after, you know, being being exposed to something that will disregulate you. So,

106:00 so some you have an event happening, you get anxious and and sort of uh fearful and that then your nervous system is able to calm down again. And so I think that if we are if we simply allow dogs to have secure attachment then perhaps the need for this sometimes this um the socialization procedures are very elaborate. There’s like a list of a

106:30 hundred things that the dog needs to be exposed to. you know, men with beards and children uh age 12 and and people with uh shoes, you know, certain types of shoes and and um um you know, the vacuum cleaner and so on and so on. There’s a whole list of things that you need to expose an animal to. And I I would think that if the animal is securely attached so that they have learned selfie regulation, being exposed to those things will not be such a big

107:00 deal. But I don’t think that we have the research to back up that assertion quite yet. I love this notion because um we can’t prepare humans, including ourselves or animals, for every circumstance, but we can um train up neural circuits. I’m I’m a neurobiologist after all. And so I I like to think of this more as as opposed to preparing for events, you prepare for processes. So, uh, you know, much has been said on this podcast and others about like

107:30 deliberate cold exposure. You know, why take a cold shower? It’s it’s not about the specific benefits of the cold shower. It’s it teaches you how to navigate having high adrenaline in your body, which is the universal generic response to stress. So, um, you can export self-regulation from one situation to the other. Um, what you’re describing is a much more, um, important life stage example than deliberate cold exposure. It’s about, as you said, being able to navigate uh attachments that are

108:00 there, then gone, then there. Again, this is one of my major concerns. We don’t want to um go off on a on a tangent too far here, but since humans are animals, as you pointed out about um texting, you know, it often times texting can be a wonderful tool. It also can be a way that people um don’t learn to ever deal with to self-regulate. Yeah. Um, you see this as the plane lands or the plane’s taking off, people, you know, frantically uh texting, which can be about, hey, my plane just arrived. It can also be about an

108:30 inability to just deal with the uh the real life uncertainty that you’re not in charge up there. The the pilots and the weather conditions are. So, in any case, I have a probably controversial question, okay? But we’ve opened up some Pandora’s boxes, so why not? Um, I opted to neuter my dog. Yeah. Uh, I did that when he was about six months old. I did that honestly reluctantly. Mhm. People

109:00 say, well, you know, men with their dogs and they don’t want to ne their dogs and it’s for these, you know, whatever Y chromosome related reasons or something. Perhaps it is. Um, but really the reason I was reluctant was a I I thought I might want to um breed Costello at some point. The other is I spent two years of my life uh studying and researching and um eventually publishing uh papers on the effects of uh early androgens on I had a minor role in that study but um effects of early androgens on brain

109:30 development and you don’t have to spend long in in that field of hormones and development to know that hormones testosterone and estrogen have a powerful powerful organizing effect on the brain of males and females. So, and that also occurs during adolescence, right? And then there’s the surge of of hormone that comes so right there happens in uterero and then and then those are the organizing effects and then there are the activating effects as you’re pointing out of hormones that then during puberty the ovaries in females or the testes in

110:00 males produce hormones that then act on this kind of template that was laid down. And so I knew that whatever testosterone, estrogen, etc. Costello had seen in utero, he’d seen. Mhm. And that by removing his testicles, let’s be honest, what neutering is, all the men are cringing and the women are like, “Okay, got it.” Um, but if I said remove ovaries, they might have a different response. So, by removing his his testes that he would not experience the um

110:30 activating effects of hormones. Okay. Uh to make a long story short, um it seemed he had a great life. He was a wonderful dog. when he got to be about 9 years old, he had a lot of joint aching and pain. He had some extensive nail growth that was really really fast. Some things were were odd. Um I opted to do um an experiment. Um and I started injecting him with 50 milligrams of testosterone per week. The response was incredible.

111:00 His vigor returned. His joint pain, at least in terms of his willingness to go down the stairs quickly, to stand up quickly. incredible. He um got two more years of what I thought was a great life. I hope it was. Um and what’s interesting is that when I talked about this publicly on a few other podcasts, I injected my bulldog with testosterone after neutering him. I thought I was going to get a tsunami of criticism from the veterary community. Okay. Instead, I

111:30 received hundreds of emails saying, “Thank you. We actually actively discourage people from neutering their animals unless they’re in a circumstance where that dog can get out and mate because we don’t need more strays. And there are a number of health positive health benefits to keeping hormones intact. And I’m going to start doing what you did with some of my my uh with some of my patient dogs. Not one vet, mind you,

112:00 I have no training as a vet. Not one vet said, “Hey, you were out of line doing that. you shouldn’t have been doing that. And I’ll tell you, if I get another dog and it’s a male dog, I’ll be very careful to not let him out and I’ll be very careful with the training so he’s not excessively aggressive, but um I’m I’m not going to neuter him. Yeah. And I know this is going to activate some people, but I’d love your thoughts on neutering in male and female dogs in particular, um given everything that you and I know about hormones and what we just talked about. Yeah, you’re touching on several different things that I think are

112:30 interesting. one that it’s a very much a cultural phenomena that in in Norway I know that you’re not allowed to neuter dogs unless for medical reasons. Really? Yeah. And in Western Australia, you’re not allowed not to neuter dogs unless for medical reason or or if you want to breed them. So, it’s it’s like very cultural whether neutering is something that you do or not in in in any given location. That’s one. The second thing is that you said that neutering is about

113:00 removing test uh testicles. Actually there’s there’s other procedures that can be done which is is essentially uh just snipping the connection. So not removing testicles so that they continue producing uh all the stuff that they produce but they um they can’t uh produ reproduce sexually. Yeah. Why don’t we just give them basectomies? when I Yeah. Yeah. So, the second and for for females, the corresponding procedure would then be to

113:30 to sort of whatever it is tie to Yeah. Tie the whatever it is. And there’s also a third option which is um chemical castration. That’s that’s reversible that you can try to see what behavioral effects you get from a change of uh hormonal status. There’s also this interesting thing that the the the knowledge of the effects of castration or of neutering has really changed a lot

114:00 in the last 20 years or so. It used to be in the 1990s that that it used to be recommended because uh you know they wouldn’t reproduce and there’d be less humping and and and some so it was sort of promoted with regards to certain behavioral changes. Later studies have shown and there’s like more than 20 in the last 20 years or so have shown that quite consistently that some of the effects of neutering

114:30 might be particularly in males apparently and it depends on the age at which this is done also and it has to do with this the activation process of course is that you’ll see an increase in fear uh an increase in in reactivity aggressive behavior you might see an increase in um uh noise uh sensitivity and so on. So it seems that as you were touching on

115:00 the change in hormonal status not only has this physiological effect on the body but also behavioral effects. Now there’s also an increase in the risk of certain cancers or certain uh physical um problems and a decrease in others. So I would I would suggest that once you do get your other your next dog that you discuss with a veterinarian the best

115:30 option for that particular breed and that particular individual because it’s it’s going to be very breed specific. It’s gender specific and it’s also the age at which these procedures are done. Okay. So to me it’s very interesting that in Norway dogs are not allowed to be fixed except for medical reasons. In Australia they have to be at least in Western Australia. Um so this idea of keeping dogs intact so to speak um is not such a heretical one. Um but I think in the United States a lot of this is

116:00 still getting worked out. And I think that the statistics say that the number of people with pets in the home now in the United States is is like almost every home. Yeah. I think it’s a 40% of Americans own a dog and I think in Norway it’s like 15. So, and and I probably this ties in a lot to why the the cultures have emerged so differently because there’s a lot less sort of backyard breeding and so on and and

116:30 feral populations in Scandinavia of dogs. So, we don’t have this huge problem with overpopulation uh that you’ll see in some other countries. So, and and I think that that here a lot of the the neutering is done to control the population uh predominantly as a way to sort of try to reduce the the number of animals uh sort of go into shelters and so on. Well, certainly there are a lot of dogs in shelters now. During the pandemic, people were adopting them like crazy.

117:00 So, it was actually hard to get dogs and cats during that time. I don’t know what the state of things is now. Someone can put that in the comments. I really have one last category of questions, but it’s a it’s one that you’ve sort of touched on from various sides throughout today’s conversation, and that relates to humans as animals. Mhm. You know, I don’t think one can be an animal ethologist or a neurobiologist for that matter um who, you know, reads

117:30 papers and does studies and uh on other animals um without at some point stepping back and making this realization like we’re we’re old world primates. We’re the best at techn technology development, you know, among all the the species. I mean, I don’t think that’s too much of a leap. Um, we’re certainly not as good at natural camouflage, um, catching and killing things with our hands. We need tools to do this. So, we have our strengths, we have our limitations with respect to the other

118:00 species. Is there anything in your training as an animal ethologist that um you know causes you to reflect on human beings as you know particularly I don’t know spectacular and particularly deficient in some way like or any just any kind of musings about the human species because that’s a species we haven’t talked about today but I think a lot of what you’re describing in terms of the breakdown of these sequence of behaviors what what makes us feel safe um you know one can’t

118:30 help but wonder like What what are some aspects of ourselves that perhaps if we thought about a little bit more deeply we could really benefit from? One thing that leaps to mind is the extent to which cultural learning occurs in humans. For other animal species they they learn from uh you know trial and error. If I do this that happens first that happens then that other thing happens. So classical conditioning and and operant conditioning uh tie into

119:00 sort of forming the animals behavior. They also have social learning. They watch someone else and look at what they do. You know, in this situation, I’m feeling a bit concern disconcerted watching you to see how you react. Oh, you don’t seem to be that upset. Okay, I guess I don’t have to be that either. Or you’re interacting with that thing in that way. I’ll guess I’ll do the same. But it’s like the influence is from the the animals that are closest to you and from your own personal experience. Uh

119:30 and we sort of stand on the shoulders of gi giants. We humans because we can we can read people’s thoughts that are thousands of years old literally. And so I think that’s one of the biggest differences I think in our learning is that we used to be called man the toolmaker as if tool making would be the the thing that set us apart from from other animals until Jane Goodall

120:00 reported that she’d seen chimpanzees making tools uh to you that ter fishing behavior that she saw where they would break off a twig and and take all the leaves off and then sharpen it and so that they could insert into into a termite mound and the termites would climb onto it and they could carefully extract it and eat the termites. So they made these tools. Uh so um yeah that would be I guess my refle my first spontaneous reflection to

120:30 your your question. That’s a great one. um frankly this idea that you know in addition to our ability to build sophisticated tools that our ability to um stamp down knowledge and I mean knowledge is always shifting. So some of the things that we’ve been discussing today and that I’ve seen said with great conviction might be proven completely false you know a year from now. So that’s that’s I think the the interesting thing about science is that we’re always having to question our assumptions. All right. I I appreciate

121:00 you reminding us of that that this is all a dynamic process. You know, it’s we we can only do so much with this uh piece of meat in our skulls in terms of trying to decipher the world around us. But I do think that this this idea of um this insight that we’re unique in our ability to learn from things long ago, stamp down things now that people could potentially learn from um not just in the present but in the future is incredible. And um in many ways appropriate for where we’re at now,

121:30 which is um you sitting here educating us about the different species. And I I want to um I really want to extend my gratitude for the the work that you do is very unique. People by now will realize that you’re you’re animal ethologist, but you pay attention to real world experiments run in a diverse range of settings. Um and it’s clear that you have great care for the all the species on the planet and how they interact. You’ve also offered us some wonderful tools of how to improve the

122:00 lives of our our cats, our dogs, and to really hopefully make people um somewhat of ethologists of themselves and of their interactions with animals. I think that’s for me one of the biggest takeaways today is to to really people listening to this and watching this should really reflect um not just on does the dog like to be pet here or there, but you know, how is it that um a certain behavior is showing up in an animal? what is that reflected because of its natural lineage and and our own and and to really think about those

122:30 relationships and trying to improve them. So you’ve given us tremendous knowledge for its own sake, practical knowledge and again there’s just so much uh care woven into everything you do that you’ve shared. So thank you for traveling such a long way to to share with us. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great discussion I think. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Carolina Westland. To learn more about her work and to find links to the various resources discussed during today’s episode, please see the show note captions. If you’re learning from

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