The Psychology of Dogs

0:00welcome back to everything's psychology today we're chatting about the psychology of the animal that's curled up at your feet or maybe snoring on the sofa or maybe even currently staring at you willing you to open the treat drawer it's been the most requested topic after i previously did the psychology of cats episode this week we're talking about the psychology of dogs we think we

0:34know them better than any creature on earth but what is actually going on behind those adorable eyes do they love us as completely as we think and how much of canine psychology involves the human at the other end of the lead with me to unpack the psychology of dogs are professor daniel mills professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at the university of lincoln and co-author of life skills for puppies and being your cat and hannah grice trainer and clinical animal behaviorist

1:08and author of playing with your dog hello both of you hi yeah hi daniel i'm going to start with you i did a bit of googling and it said that we've lived alongside dogs for something like 30 000 years which is longer than any other animal so what did dogs figure out that bonded them to humans so you're quite right dogs are the first domestic species and it's interesting that it's a you know a companion animal for us now rather than a farm animal almost certainly you know dogs exploited an

1:43opportunity um that they saw and there's various theories as to why that might be uh one is that humans humans were creating waste from they were killing more than they um could consume and therefore those wolves that uh were less afraid of humans could actually access that food source and therefore wheedle their way in um another theory is that in the course of hunting um that uh maybe

2:14sort of modern humans may actually have done more to injure particularly the large game they were going after and wolves are very good at that long trekking and they may have ultimately delivered the final kill and then the humans arrive with their spears etc get rid of the wolves and so actually you start to get a mutual relationship in in hunting because the humans can access these large game but they depend on the the wolves for the tracking and for perhaps the final kill but then can chase them off

2:46so there's that sort of um mutual benefit in terms of access to to food and those that are you know don't attack their humans may have been more tolerated and so the whole process goes by and i you know that's a much i think more sensible model than thinking that wolves or humans thought about this and thought hmm i want to be with you you know they're not actually thinking that much about it they're taking the opportunity in at that stage and so it's like a mutually beneficial arrangement to start with

3:18the dogs were tools for us but also they gained something from us as well yeah absolutely and although there's people have argued of where were dogs first domesticated it seems there were a number of failed dog domestications in various places and it wouldn't be surprising if yeah you know that dogs were domesticated in several places um around about the same time because similar circumstances arose yeah okay hannah i guess the other animal that we're most closely have a

3:48relationship with is cats as well is that a different kind of relationship that we have with cats than we have with dogs do you think um i say yes because uh you know their communication styles are very different and their evolutionary history is different you've just been listening about how we cooperated with one another or dogs were opportunists uh in having that waste and and being used for hunting whereas you know cats evolved uh more as solitary hunters so um i think when it comes down to

4:22the relationship certainly they're quieter in their communication um signals so they may rub against us whereas a dog might be more overt with the full buddy waggle so it would be unfair to use the cliche that dogs are more loving and cats are aloof but i think it's that cats have evolved in a different way to our dogs and they're much more subtle so i do know not only being a cat owner but when we look at the research you know attachment styles do have parallels with infants and their parents as well as

4:59with dogs and there's been various different research around that um christian vitale has done some around uh cats that showed that they did have insecure and secure attachment type patterns with their caregivers so i think yes there's a definite bond there between cats and their owners it's just that the relationship's different not lesser does that make sense yeah yeah i like how you described it there's a subtle the subtle sort of love and it's a different sort of thing there and i guess cats

5:30could be seen as a tool in some respect you've got the stories of cats being used as mouses on farms and used to keep pest control down so they had a purpose uh to be welcomed into the uh human environment to start with i mean maybe i'm just being you know a cat owner and a dog lover and an animal lover but whilst this sort of talk of tools you know and being useful and the symbiotic relationship is is nice they're just so adorably cute fluffy warm things to hold is there like an evolutionary pull mammal to

6:05mammal that we just want to love them as well daniel yes certainly in the case of dogs we know that there's a whole sort of physiology which may also sort of kick in so you know we like to think of ourselves as very sophisticated and sort of uh logical but actually we respond to very superficial characteristics i'm sure many people you know you've seen dots on a screen moving and somebody said oh that's a person walking it's just a group of dots and we we you know we our brains fill in the rest and they they try and make those things familiar it's very similar isn't it to um pareidolia

6:40now pareidolia is the effect where we see faces where there are none so you might see a face in the coffee bubbles or something like that go it's a face yeah so absolutely so what we see in uh dogs is and and in humans is they are attracted to each other's faces um and in humans when we see things like big eyes high foreheads short limbs actually that brings out a nurturing in us so you know so we can

7:10be attracted to particular types of dogs and we've actually done some work we've not published it yet but uh what we found is that people who tended to keep these short-nosed breeds of dogs that have these features actually were much more sensitive to these features in general um and they were sort of they and that sort of they seem to have more caring in in terms of what they wanted to care for and that was a big part of what they wanted in the relationship um now there is a downside to that

7:41because obviously the extremes of short noses have all sorts of health problems and we also are starting to think that one of the other things that brings out that caring instinct is like a toddler's gait which is uncertain but what that means when we transfer it to dogs is we're attracted to dogs who aren't walking properly so dogs who've got actually lamenesses or been inbred and got all sorts of issues um so you know the the biology can play with our minds as well and we're attracted to these

8:12things the problem is almost they feel helpless and they need our help yeah so it because we've got this strong nurturing does it am i going to ask a stupid question but that's my job here um does the idea that we like dogs that have that baby-like features as you mentioned the high foreheads big eyes you know type thing and therefore gets that nurturing response does that have any connection to the maybe myth of animals looking like their owners and therefore they pick a dog that almost looks a bit

8:43like them or do you think that's not true in the slightest it's not a myth actually there have been studies where you look to people's preferences and they are more likely to select individuals that have some resemblances so again from a biological point of view we choose a mate and i'm not saying what we're choosing dogs as mates but we're attracted to individuals who look somewhat similar to us but are different and as when it comes to a mate you don't want them to be too similar because they could

9:14be too closely related and uh you know inbreeding is not good but they would need to be reasonably uh similar because you don't want to have sex with a gorilla you know because that's not going to be very successful biologically speaking so um so there is that sort of attraction and again you know just to show you how tight the sort of bond is when we look into the eyes of each other whether it's a human looking into the eyes of a dog or the dog into the eyes of a human then we get oxytocin released which

9:44is the big bonding chemical that is really important so you know it's it's more than just sort of a simple learned response there's a very strong biology behind this interesting and hannah you train dogs and you help owners with new puppies and dogs so you get to see this every day just you know out of interest have you had it so that you you had an owner and their dog and you've just gone wow you look so similar yeah uh to be honest is it we do have a giggle sometimes in the puffy classes when you know

10:18the red setter walks in and the lady's got gorgeous red locks you know um or the curly coated dog with the lady or gentleman with very curly hair so yeah um there is a sweeping statement to say that of course but you know the owners tend to be very um open and have a giggle themselves and it's not something they they've not heard before put it that way um i i don't know i think we are innately you know birds of a feather that flock together so perhaps you know that element is there when we're choosing our pets but there has

10:52been some work done where it was uh clive win and some of his colleagues were looking at um periods of dogs in terms of age and development where we're most attracted to them and around about um the really early weeks so we're talking sort of four or five weeks of age where they're cute but you know they're still a bit um too infantile looking um you know uh compared to an eight week or 10 week old and then they

11:23had another look at sort of 16 weeks and then 20 weeks and so on and so on and and what was really interesting peak attractiveness to to these two groups of puppies that they used to show the participants was around that eight to ten week marker and they suggested that that's possibly you know uh that hardwired pull to want to care for this cute vulnerable uh creature triggering those caregiving responses because that's the time naturally mum will go okay off you go i'm done now

11:57um so i thought that was really interesting when you were chatting about attractedness beyond just physical appearances you know there seems to be something hardwired in terms of the development when we're you know surrounded by those puppies at certain ages they kind of lose their cuteness once they hit puberty as it were there's another bit to this story as well because there's also studies that show that as far as personality goes there's there's it's not random the personalities of the owners and their dogs and there is a degree of matching in personalities to a degree so you know it's as

12:33hannah says it's not a very strong correlation the physical appearance but it is more than random and the same actually can go with aspects of personality as well how amazing yeah i was going to ask daniel to to um expand about uh where there's been research not to say that anxious or neurotic owners if if they were doing an assessment and they came out of that always have neurotic or anxious dogs however i wondered if you could just um uh develop on some of the research that has shown that because that's really

13:06interesting i think for some of the listeners or those viewers who are into psychology how those personalities can sort of transfer as well or be seen with dogs as well yeah and it's an interesting one because the the one of the areas where there is a strong link between um personality traits is anxiety um neuroticism in in the typical human literature the difficulty though with a lot of this work is especially when you talk about the anxiety a lot of anxious dogs have all sorts of

13:40behavior problems as you and i both know working with them um so is the person's anxiety because they've got a dog that's showing aggressive behavior um and to what or is the person's anxiety causing anxiety in the dog now we certainly know that you know you can simply get an owner uh you know who is anxious if you can get them to relax the way they hold the lead the dog's behavior will change it's not a cure but when they're tense and they hold the lead in a tense way then um you know the dog will be

14:15much more anxious and there's lots of ways in which humans unfortunately sort of miscommunicate a classic example is when the dog is anxious you know there's a number of things that people do um uh you know most people we hope now know but not everybody that you shouldn't tell your dog off when they're anxious because if you do you're telling the dog there is something to be scared of i become moody and nasty so you shouldn't ignore the dog because then the dog doesn't know that you've

14:45you've clogged what they was making them anxious because that doesn't help them so they don't get any support nor should you actually try and console them and i'll tell you what you should do in a minute um because when you try to console them what you typically do is you know you say oh poor dog and whatever and just me saying that immediately i've leant forward and hunched my shoulders i've made myself small and when we sort of speak in these tones they're not a normal tone and what the dog almost certainly reads in that situation is they see you making yourself small talk more quietly

15:20talk in these strange tones and so from the dog's point of view oh my god my human is worried as well so that doesn't help the dog so what we've developed uh one of the protocols we've developed here is what we call the sensitive carer and i always tell the story of my mum in this because i'm the youngest of five kids my mum had one of us one year after the other so she had five kids under the age of five well you know we would be in the garden fall out of a tree come in crying and my mum would kiss it better and tell us to go and play because and and that was actually brilliant because that is what a sensitive

15:56carer does first of all she acknowledged my distress that's the kiss and then she told me to go out and play i.e you fell out of the tree it was an accident it doesn't mean that life is dangerous so what we do with the dogs is when the dog is anxious you say what was that and again the way that you talk about it is in a much more upbeat so you're acknowledging that something strange has happened but your tones don't communicate the fear you connect with the dog and we've we've talked about the importance of

16:27connecting with the dog and then our behavior we show interest in something else we show interest in perhaps in the dog's toy without talking to the dog directly and this is important because we then focus in something that the dog really likes and the dog chooses to say oh well yeah you were startled as well in effect um but you're interested in this so obviously it's not that important and that breaks the cycle of making matters worse and when the dog eventually comes around and looks at you with those big eyes and says oh can i play you ignore them for a couple of seconds and you say oh

17:01hello and you ask them to do a couple of unrelated things before you give them the toy and again that just avoids inadvertent reinforcement to the behavior so you know that's the way to manage when a dog is anxious i know it's gone off tangent but we're here to chat about anything and everything exactly yeah it sounds you've brought it in with your example with your mom but it sounds very similar to young children where you know a child who falls over often who hasn't really hurt themselves but it's a shock look to the caregivers looks to the adults first to see what reaction they're getting and if

17:33it's a worried reaction is it are you all right and they will then start to cry whereas if again you upbeat you know oh what happened there yeah come on brush that off and then distraction oh look at that you know should we go to the ice cream van then normally it's you know a fine reaction it sounds similar upbeat tone and distraction absolutely it is exactly the same it's where we've borrowed it from the human psychology yeah and if you loop back to your original question about have they figured us out and daniel's points that he's just made are all linked to the fact that that those thousands upon

18:09thousands of years of domestication what they have developed is being blooming good at reading us you know whether that's our tone of voice whether that's our facial expressions where we're looking pointing where our body is you know the point about you leaning in daniel and so on and so on and some of the work that gregory burns has done they train dogs to lay in fmr scanners and in real time they're watching what happens when we change our tone of voice or we stick a bit of food near them and

18:40so all of this fantastic research with um the underbelly of human psychology has really helped i think it's important to make yeah and i um to make the point though that there is a tendency for us to think that because dogs behave in very compatible ways with us that they're thinking in the same way as us but the point that hannah's made i think is also that they're very good at reading us dogs are incredibly observant um and they will pick up on those nuances um we did some work many years ago

19:13with some colleagues in brazil where we basically set up an experiment where we had a giver and a receiver and the dog needed help um in accessing something and ordinarily you know you would go with some if you see somebody giving something and somebody taking something if you've got a choice most people will go with the person who is giving because you can see that they give uh they give resources and so we had two actors dressed similarly but we put them as happy or neutral or um angry and match that against

19:48givers and receivers and the dogs always went with the happy face so it doesn't matter whether you're the giver or receiver if you were happy i want to be with you um and that's what they're really tuned into because you know an angry human is not a good individual to be hanging around with you know if you think about it um so what they weren't analyzing the motivations and thinking oh who's giving who's receiving they would observe it but they were focusing more on who's you know who's happy and we've seen that with sweat tests as well so where they've done um cognitive bias tests with dogs

20:25so they've had unfamiliar people doing some sort of um exercise or whatever and then um a neutral group and then sort of um you know calming calming exercise so then they present the different types of sweat to the dogs and then they've also taught the dogs at the same time that a box in one location typically predicts food a box in another typically predicts there's no food and then they put a box somewhere in between and they watch the dogs having been presented with different types of sweat the

20:58ones that were presented with the stress sweat were um they found that they were more likely not to investigate so more pessimistic let's say than those that uh weren't presented with the the human stress um scent so i think that's interesting beyond just the facial expressions as well so they're obviously they've got fantastic olfactory systems but they're using that information as well so coming back to the point about if we're stressed and anxious when we're on a walk because our dog may

21:31lunge or bark they're going to pick up on all sorts of information not just what's going on in the environment so we have to take that into account as practitioners what's the human end uh you know what's happening at the human end as well yeah yeah that's really interesting and what i'm hearing and do correct me is that if dogs are really good at reading us whether it be facial expressions tone of voice scent are they manipulators in order to get what they need or do they love us and as part of my

22:03research on this episode i did a walkies online and i consolidated lots of questions that people asked on reddit and cora to see what's the most asked question that people asked and and strangely the most asked question number one was does my dog actually love me or has it just worked out that i'm the one that opens the food so are they manipulators or do they actually love us hannah um well with my labrador probably both um but what i would say is yeah i mean i would say

22:33dogs love um and we've got to be careful how we sort of explain what that means but certainly if i come home or an owner comes home and they're getting the whole full body waggle you know that we would see signs that we would say we would attribute to love yeah they're pleased to see us they're happy to see us upon reunion um or happy to play with us but i think um in terms of food if we kind of go back to reducing our relationship just about food i think that's a disservice because uh god if you look at

23:10the early work around cupboard love and then harlow's monkeys he showed that actually those monkeys wanted to have the comfort of the blanket monkey rather than the wire monkey holding food so you know there has to be safety there has to be trust predictability in the relationship warmth um and uh i think that's where the love then stems but you can still have a client i've got clients who absolutely adore their dogs they love their dogs and seemingly the behaviors of the dog towards them would uh we could

23:42say a love but at the same time the dog may be destroying the house or you know biting the owner when they've got a valued item and that can be really confusing for clients and that's when the relationship can break down yes okay and just to carry on that topic of love daniel i'm going to come to you on that because you've mentioned earlier that when you dog owners look and gaze into each other's eyes they get a spike of oxytocin you're that that bonding hormone so is that love when the chemical romance kicks in it's it's one of the things that contributes to that sense of love yeah and you

24:17know i think i agree with hannah that you know dogs love us but in a doggy way um and that's but that it's you know some people do say yeah dogs are like cuckoo's in the nest they're just exploiting us um in the same way as a cuckoo does um they're not as i said they're not thinking about it in that way um they have a bond with us and when we think about bonds and relationships you know bond is a reason to be together um we spoke earlier about you know why dogs and humans come together and there's

24:48a mutual gain and that you can be very transactional about that and say well they're only interested in the resources but actually bonds are often more than that humans you know yes we might just have a business relationship but actually that's a bit alien to dogs so if you're going to work with someone you have an affiliation with them you know that's the whole point of an affiliation is we're better together we achieve more things together it's a very human thing to sort of be cynical about that

25:20and say oh you're just exploiting uh the niche because i say that's a cognitive process whereas these bonds are very emotional and they're certainly there so when we think about a relationship we can think about it in terms of yeah affiliation which is we are better together we can think about it in terms of caregiver and care receiver i'm looking for you to provide me with things i'm a care receiver but also there's an element of i will care for you if you've got a guard dog so and they will conceptualize the relationship if they're clear within those sort of boundaries and these can all

25:55come together hannah mentioned earlier about attachment and attachment the word attachment is used in a variety of different ways and um in dogs there are clear signs that the sort of characterization that we see of attachment um in infants is a reasonably good model for dogs but it's it's not totally there and there are issues even as you i'm sure you know in the human field with attachment and the attachment tests that are very culturally biased towards western societies um and you know with

26:30dogs yeah they will certainly act as a care receiver and they will receive um care from those individuals um and they will have a degree of exclusivity in the case of cats we're less certain about how exclusive cats are and i was trying to ask about the cat difference yeah yeah that's and so to what degree is it social support rather than a true you are my carer dogs certainly do make that discrimination they also form very quickly that relationship and again just to pick up on the sort of

27:02original ideas of attachment from bolby and and ainsworth and the westernized view is that put a lot of emphasis on the mother or the primary carer um well in africa you know the saying is it takes a village to raise a child and when african mothers native african mothers have seen um things like the ainsworth test they've been horrified the fact that you abandon a child you just wouldn't do that um but they so in the case of dogs what's important is they will have individuals that they prefer

27:36and they will have that attraction um do you want to call that love yeah i think you know they see similar physiological changes there's a calming effect and factors like that um and there is a degree of exclusivity as to who they offer that to so you know not everybody is equal so i think that's i think that's love um okay i think we've we've got the dog owners back on side again i think you know we had we'd say they they do love you good um and we talked about attachment there and it it led me to

28:09i asked basically my dog owning friend sarah uh if anything she wanted to ask and she mentioned that her dog she described has totally attached himself to her and won't leave her alone i mean more than her husband more than the their child more than anyone comes to visit but she also said the reason she's worried about that is because she feels that it doesn't give him joy that he gets very anxious when he leaves and she said she's worried she's in a toxic doggy relationship it's she's it's not she's

28:41not far off point um people sometimes talk about yeah velcro dogs or hyper attached dogs as you know in the human literature hyper attachment doesn't exist and actually what we're now realizing that those velcro dogs a lot of them are actually suffering from what we a form of insecure attachment in the same way as you know um you might drink a lot because you want to drink a lot but you might drink a lot because you're dehydrated and those dogs are sticking close to their humans perhaps because for some

29:11reason it's not necessarily the human's fault they're not getting all the requirements of a secure bond or secure attachment from that owner sometimes it is associated with inconsistent behavior um so if an owner is inconsistent with their dog and this is why it's important not to use punishment because if you use punishment with your dog how does your dog know i can be safe with you so you might achieve good behavior with the dog but psychologically the dog doesn't know that they're safe with you and

29:42that's you know that's a concern yeah hannah you you must get lots of people coming to you with anxiety problems whether it be that velcro dog thing what do you say to them what do you help them with in order to come out of that and get a better relationship with their with their loved dog i'm going to say daniel's done a lot of work on this so um i think he's in a better place to describe some of the the research around it because i personally don't like saying using the term anxiety to describe

30:13everything i like to ask a lot more questions i'm going to defer to daniel first if that's okay to give you the broader of course of course so i mean what we tend to do is assuming we do we did develop a scale looking at owner caregiving style um which is a bit like maternal caregiving style we we spoke about the work with children you know and people talk about different attachment styles in children but that's partly driven by how the carers care for them in that style we did a similar thing for the owners if we see high levels on some of the more potentially problematic caregiving styles so

30:49inconsistency it's perfectly understandable i'm not here to judge people you know if you've got a dog that's trashing the house you're going to lose your rag with them occasionally but that you know it does have an impact on the dog so what we tend to do is we identify where there are issues and we look to try and bring in consistency we talk about the importance of trying to avoid punishment yes if you're annoyed with your dog go out in the garden and shriek but don't do it in front of the dog yeah these sorts of things um look to be consistent make sure that you're playing with your dog you know

31:23that's the big way in which dogs form friends and friendships it's not about giving them treats the whole time it's about doing things together synchronizing your behavior yeah and i'm going to pass that baton on to you hannah because this is what your book's all about the importance of play with dogs can you elaborate on that well basically i mean this was written a long time ago because back then i didn't think we talked enough about it and i recognized exactly what we've just been hearing

31:54it's so important in terms of building confidence resilience independence if we're teaching solo play rather than always relying on the owner to chuck the ball or whatever it is or play tug um and i also think you know there are shared parallels in it with child development in the sense that it does help with emotional regulation teach social skills you know that back and forth type uh rhythm of a relationship and so i think there is the dog appropriate version of that too and so for me i think i mean you can have all sorts of play but good play for me is something that supports the dog's

32:31confidence their coordination it helps get their brain working so problem solving or can help with linguistic understanding you know so while we're teaching words and attaching that to stuff and asking them to then discriminate let's say out of a pile of a bunch of toys it can help teach uh spatial awareness it can help recover after stressful events so dan will use the example of you know on a walk and there's been a sudden event that's startled you know wait for a second to then sort of

33:02move over to a toy or you know go sniff a lay of grass or do something and so play helps with such a lot of that but that's why i think it's critical and and helps build that secure a bond with an owner how would you teach a dog play time's over oh well basically i personally just go finished or all done and toys go away so i try and keep it simple and i liken this to my children when i used to go to soft play there comes a point where if i stay just a few more minutes too long there's

33:37going to be tears at bedtime i'm not going to settle them down so it's kind of recognizing when are we getting at the point where the turn taking isn't happening or there's less pauses or the play style is a bit more um frenetic and then we need to recognize okay i might deviate and do a find it and get them sort of sniffing and put the toys away so we do have to recognize when you need to regulate our dog even if they can't themselves and is it a good idea to have a consistent end of play

34:08signal you like you said finished hands out that's it now yeah daniel what would you say yeah absolutely it's it's and it's really it is really important because it needs to be clear um i would you know yeah i do exactly the same hands up that's it all over all gone whatever but then i'll give them something to entertain themselves so i'm you know you can have fun but i'm i'm done and again you know with play another important element to it is that reciprocality you know we should goof around with our dogs um so you know sometimes yeah you know it shouldn't all be

34:43one way and us directing let the dog sometimes dictate things you know and that that's absolutely fine yeah but there's got to be boundaries oh interesting you say that i i it was linking it to some questions i saw online again about playing with a dog can get the dog excited you know they very much enjoy that but around children and small children what boundaries do you need to have that the dog can still play but it feels safe around children or not the dog feels safe the owner feels

35:14safe that their dog can still be around their children so i mean a child should never be left unsupervised with a dog doesn't i don't care how good the dog is because any dog you know can um bite a child not necessarily because of anything wrong with the dog the child might poke the dog you know and the dog responds so it must always be supervised but i think actually children playing with dogs is a great opportunity to for them to learn if it's well supervised i would focus on the child and teach them exercises all the wonderful things they can do with the dog teaching them to do

35:48things realize that actually the power of rewards is much better than complaining about the dog you know and actually you help the child's development by doing that and they can play you know they can have a lot of fun i mean i said you know i'm the youngest of five my two brothers came first my two sisters i was left with the two dogs that's probably why i'm in the job that i'm in because i just used to play with them and my mom said to me i remember amber who sort of i was very close to a cocker spaniel by the age of two i trained her to do all sorts of stuff and i was hardly speaking i

36:19should think at that age but i had the dogs to play with brilliant yeah how about you do you get that you know people owners coming to you worried about their dogs around their children yeah absolutely and and in the uk we're coming into some schools were already finished for the summer but most of them finish next week and actually that's why next week i've got my kids and dogs adventure class to try and you know help develop that um understanding but but also nurture it's really important you know that we build those lovely bonds and and not kind of scaremonger too much but be

36:52sensible so um coming back to your point with with babies so uh i i did some research back in 2010 and then um actually did it as my research project for my masters um a number of years ago what happens when uh the new baby arrived so i looked at pre and postpartum dog owning relationships and what was fascinating is that sadly for the dog whether they love the dog or not the intensity i developed like

37:24this intensity of attachment scale it did alter you know so my research supported others which said dog walks lessened so they were less frequent or the durations were reduced um play time significantly reduced uh so easy kind of interactions like giving treats increased uh but what was really powerful was the sheer amount of guilt felt by those owners they didn't love their dog any less they just had less

37:57time and so the quality type and frequency of those dog owner interactions were what was screwed basically um i don't want to make a blanket statement because you've got to take the individual and the individual's relationship but yeah there's a million and one takeaways i could say but most importantly they need their own space so where children can do like mine leaping off screeching and you know playing doing random erratic things but the dog can be away from that so they both have their own

38:27kind of chill out zones the kids have a playroom or whatever um or at least room dividers if that's not feasible we need to make sure that the dog um can uh rest in peace because quality undisturbed sleep is critical so i like teaching my kids little mantras that are easy to remember and the other i need to set the owners the parents are sort of reinforcing that so it's like quiet and slow is the way to go really easy we just teach it when the dog's resting eating sleeping um uh you know interacting with the

39:02toy and you've got to go by quiet and slow is the way to go um and then thirdly gosh teaching or getting um parents to recognize and also supporting children's ability to spot early signs where the dog saying not really enjoying this because a lot of dogs will tolerate with an awful lot but there'll be a again university of lincoln uh daniel and his peers you've done loads of work around dog bites so

39:32i'm going to pass that over to you but sadly children are the most common victims typically of dog bites yeah i mean and it's it's it is a problem and the one of the interesting things that's been found is when it comes to reading dogs it doesn't seem to be just about knowing what to look out for you actually have to immerse yourself around dogs this is the difference between knowing something and having a skill what's being found is that people who are immersed in dogs when they analyze dog dog interactions they use the same bits of the brain as when they're analyzing human human interactions

40:06whereas people who are not immersed in dogs don't so you know they're in effect they've got these blind spots they might know what they're supposed to be looking for but they just won't see it and they won't interpret it in the same way um so you know one of my concerns yeah with the dog bites is that people are removing themselves from dogs and so they're not getting the experience they're not it's not that they they may have been told what to look for but you've got to be around dogs if you want to learn to read dogs and a lot of that is done without us sitting there with pen and paper noting it you know

40:42it's actually done by the brain just looking for patterns and saying you know what that dog ran off at that point and the brain is clocking all of this stuff and that's how we learn to read other animals is actually by immersing ourself in and working out what our brain does all of that without bothering to tell us yeah it's an automatic reaction for us i'm going to come out of that conversation back to a question which is the second most asked question on the internet which was why does my dog lick me so much is it love is it my taste or is it something else entirely hannah what do you think i'd say it

41:17could be all of the above uh you know i i always joke to clients saying until i invent that microphone where i can go tell me why you're doing what you're doing have you not invented that yet no but my goodness wouldn't we be rich if we did so let's let's put our heads together but anyway um what i would say is there's gosh there's multiple reasons i mean we we can only just sort of guess at them you know let's say you know the person's coming from a jog and they're sweaty you know the dog may be sort of fact finding or actually quite like the taste and that's highly reinforcing so they keep doing

41:51it um sometimes our chemical scent may change uh so if we're pregnant or poorly perhaps that could be driving some sort of exploratory behavior um you know maybe it's an attention seeking thing so for example um i've had lots of situations where people may be uh sat down reading or on their phone and the dog's licking them and so automatically they'll stop what they're doing and pay attention to the dog so the dog goes ah interesting i'll do that again um conversely they might be told off but it's still

42:21some form of attention so there can be loads of reasons why i'm more concerned if it's excessive or um you know it's then um there might be a need that's unmet so they're trying to tell us something like can you let me out for a wee or a poo or i'm hungry frustrated or you know it escalates from there so um i don't know why they lick i can only give you various theories as to why it may happen yeah and i would i'd agree with everything hannah said but if you think about it you know we've got

42:52hands that we can use to stroke dogs dogs have got tongues they haven't got the paws they're not going to stroke us with their paws they're going to use their tongue so it could be like a mutual grooming representation there so i actually had a client i was chatting to last week and she was saying about her dog licking and whenever the dog went to the vets it would just lick and lick and lick and it almost certainly was using it just to disrupt what was going on because the vet couldn't do what the vet wanted to do if the dog's constantly trying so you know they will learn these strategies as well

43:23so there's no single reason for any behavior really yeah fair enough um daniel you've written about the importance of owners teaching their dogs life skills what do you mean by that so you know traditionally people especially if they've got a pet with problem behavior one of the things they'll commonly say is my dog won't do what i want when i tell him to do it and there's a difference between being well behaved and being obedient you know i have to take the example my two sons they're pretty obedient um if we have a

43:57meal you know they'll put the dishes in the dishwasher if i ask them they're pretty well behaved actually i don't have to ask them at the end of a meal they take their dishes and they put them in i don't want to have to be telling them the whole time so life skills is really about adapting to our environments and doing the right thing making the right decision without having to be asked so rather than it being obedience led i do this which is you know uh instructional it says you know we

44:28get on well when you do these things equally um so you know if how to greet people appropriately um equally if you're startled that some startles are good so you don't become you don't think that unexpected things necessarily you don't default to biting in those situations um but equally if i'm eating food um you just settle down you don't pester me you know those sorts of things you could you know you can train a dog that you know i'm eating please sit down and whatever i don't want to

45:00have to say that the whole time i want the dog to know that when i'm sat at the table i take myself off i go and find something to entertain myself you know and the dog does that so there that's what we mean by life skills so it sounds very idealistic i'm sure people listening are going that'd be wonderful if my dog didn't jump up at every stranger on the street because they you know as you said did the right thing without being asked how do you get to that point and well the book's called life skills for puppies you start at the beginning um and you start as you mean to go on same with children you know it's much easier if you start at the beginning and just set things up

45:35and you have these rules and these are the boundaries and they will accept them they'll absorb them very very easily um obviously you know if things have got out of hand then we do need professional help in order to support us in order to do that but that's a lot of what we are often trying to do we're trying to develop an appropriate relationship between uh the owners and carers and and their pets uh so i'm going to go into some quick fire questions um where you can answer as long as short as you wish to but they're meant to be obviously sort of quick as you can and daniel

46:09i'm going to start with you i'm going to do all of yours and then i'll move over to hannah and i'll do yours so daniel are you ready okay here we go dogs or cats which are smarter um i hate that question um everything is smart in its own way um so there's i just you know everything is adapted to its own ability so i always tell people the story clark's nutcracker has a fantastic memory for space because it has to cash food over winter um so we all have the intelligence we need for our

46:42own environment so it's an impossible question to answer very balanced answer um what do dogs do best that we underrate observe i think uh they're very good observers i think we underrate that and we tend to insert that the dog's thinking about it and therefore sort of put little human brains in them and therefore blame them for not getting things right um but they're incredibly good observers do dogs dream absolutely um yeah yeah what they dream about i don't know but i certainly get the

47:15impression that some of them dream about chasing rabbits and things like that but yeah dreaming's part of the way that our brain does stuff what's the most over-diagnosed dog problem i'd probably say um anxiety related to fear when a lot of anxieties are actually related to frustration i.e the animal's not sure what they should do or they they're so they're in a state of conflict whereas fear the the models that we've developed when we define fear we mean that there is a threat

47:51to the animal's survival when an animal is scared now as humans we very quickly take any anxiety and turn it into a fear um we often use the word fear when we just mean something bad's going to happen i fear i might lose my house well that's sort of that's losing a resource yeah um in a biological sense fear means i fear for my life um and so we often take ideas and like things that we're uncertain about

48:22and then in effect that's how we end up worrying whereas for cats dogs horses etc they live in that emotional world and they're thinking i'm not sure what i should do in that situation and actually that needs a different approach to treatment to an animal that is very sensitive to threats if they're sensitive to threats we have to focus on recalibrating that sensitivity whereas if they don't have the control they're not sure what they should do we have to focus first on teaching them

48:53this is what you're supposed to do in this situation and you know it works um makes sense brilliant thank you daniel anna are you ready for yours i'm so glad i didn't get the cat and dog one yeah you don't want to make any enemies no okay anna what's the most underrated training tool in your opinion human body language because they are highly skilled at reading us so we may say something and our hands may be doing something completely different or our feet or our gaze and the dog's just going i don't know what you want what's the best days to start training a puppy

49:27from the day you get your puppy so life skills settling toileting chewing on appropriate items knowing that they could be handled and trust that and recall what's one game every dog should be playing for me it's scent work literally just learning to find it whether it's food toys another person or another pet in the home really good to get their nose engaged brain working and it's it can be as high of a household as you want or as low so it's it's just helpful for busy dogs worried dogs

50:01puppies old dogs you name it brilliant praise or treats which is better both can matter but it depends on the individual dog what motivates them uh and what you're trying to teach them um so i would say it's not a versus it's what does the dog find reinforcing in that moment finally the behavior clients panic about most but shouldn't uh growling uh it's useful information

50:33tells us the dog's feeling uncomfortable something needs to change so a common mistake is punishing the growl because then the dog learns that's uh that's now unsafe to do it and we've just lost that really important warning signal um so we should never punish a growl treat it as information and then work out what we need to stop um that was happening in the first place that led to the ground fantastic i'm just going to finish off with something i call q and ai where basically i fed all of the publicly

51:03available information i had on both of you into a leading ai agent and i asked it for the one thing that it would want to ask you if it could so always a bit odd from a from an ai perspective but daniel here is your one i can process every study ever written on dogs but i'll never have a dog rest its head on my lap from the outside that bond looks like the most powerful behavioral technology on earth professor mills what is the human dog relationship giving people that an intelligence like

51:40me however capable can never replicate emotional empathy i should think uh well yeah genuine emotional empathy um so people can read stuff into ai but you know there is a yeah a truthfulness in what a dog shows you so sorry ai you need to work on your empathy hannah okay this is your one from the ai

52:12i'm told i'm a very fast learner no treats required honey if you had to train me an ai with no body no nose and no tail to wag using only your positive science-led methods where on earth would you even start i like the way she said my name um so i start the same way with any learner so what's the behavior we actually want what does success look like um and what feedback tells the learner they're on the

52:44right track so with an ai i'm now going to want to do this so with an ai i'm going to give clear feedback good prompts examples clear criteria for success and marking what's working if they get it wrong i give neutral feedback specific feedback maybe reword the question narrow the criteria check the output again against any evidence and ask ai to do it again and just like dogs i'm focusing on

53:15the behavior i want more of adapting for the learner rewarding accuracy transparency and evidence over ai confidence which it seems to have a lot of but not necessarily correct does that help interestingly the way you've described that is is almost exactly how ai has got to the point it has because ai for a long time didn't work it just couldn't do what we wanted to do and then they introduced behavioral reinforcement learning into the ai engines almost exactly as you

53:45just said it there not obviously for praise and things like that because that doesn't affect it but for when it comes up with what is a satisfactory good answer and they praise it and get forward and they reinforce that and keep going that's why we've got the ai we've got today because of behavioral techniques like you've just described yeah yeah of course it's learning it's all learning exactly yeah yeah thank you so much both of you i think that's all we've got time for uh dr uh mills or professor mills where can people find out more about your work you can find out uh me through the

54:15university of lincoln website although i'm about to retire um so after that i still will have a presence at the university but um i will be setting up my own company companion animal consulting dot com brilliant and i'll put that in the show notes that people can look at that as well hannah where can people find out more about you that's my name so it's hannah grice dot com spelled h-a-double-n-e grice although ai would call me hanny hanny as we just saw something it can do and obviously your books i'll put the links to the books uh in the show notes as well hanny i know

54:48hanny you've got me doing it now yeah i'm not really real yeah you've also got social media accounts where i know you're very active within tech talk and on youtube as well so i really encourage people to follow you on there and you've also got clothing which is really really nice right so i'm not trying to be like a philip green and having an empire what i would say is the reason why i did that is because the cases and daniel probably has similar experiences

55:20the cases could be really um emotionally draining that we're working with so i've always had an interest in sort of designing in bits and bobs so it's all aimed at animal owners obviously there's animal things but it's just it's a bit of a hobby to give me some breathing space from the day to day um yeah and it's really lovely things i very much like the team cat tote bag i'll be getting one of those i do have a bone to pick with you though pun intended um you've got the male section and the

55:52female section and then children's and accessories you go to the male section and it's all dog related things there's no male cat things i i will do better for you paul so i will sort that out if i can get a team cat t-shirt that's what i want yeah yeah there is a team cat kids one so unless you like the kind of crop top effect i will sort that out yeah that'd be great i can be seen in public then that'd be great thank you very much both of you bye take care bye now so there we have it

56:23everything you needed to know about the psychology of dogs and looking at my pad and what i scribbled down i've got three main takeaways here amongst all of the wonderful tips that are in the episode and the first one is no shock really dogs do love us brilliant and whilst the human dog relationship may have started through mutual benefit with dogs being tools that could be used to enhance the camp and our lives and also it enhances their life as well that quickly deepened into a genuine emotional

56:55bond shaped by domestication attachment and cues like mental gaze and as daniel said that oxytocin release as well the second point i think i've got here is that dogs are extraordinary readers of human behavior they pick up on our tone our body language our facial expressions and i even sent as hannah was talking about as well which means you they can understand our own stress and are inconsistently uh and therefore their behavior can be strongly affected by how we respond to them so we should

57:29be thinking as much about the psychology of a dog owner as much as the psychology of dog themselves and finally i think the good dog relationships are built through safety play and other clear life skills as daniel said and the practical takeaway here is to focus less on obedience and obedience training for its own sake and more on helping dogs feel secure get them to play well regulate themselves and learn how to behave appropriately without constant commands and as daniel's put it be able to do the

58:04right thing without being asked that's the ultimate goal and in there daniel gave tips on how to do that so i hope you enjoyed the episode um if you're interested in this and you also have cats then do check out the previous episode with dr claude bietta where we talk about the psychology of cats it's one of the most listened to episodes i've done so far and it's certainly one of the most popular on tiktok which i got over 200 000 views and things like that so it's really popular so let's see dogs versus cats on the episode who's going to win if you enjoyed the episode or any of the others

58:39please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts it does help if you can leave a review that'd be amazing as well because it helps others know that maybe they should be listening to this as well and if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to me to focus on and then i can get academics or relevant people involved then just email me at paul at everything's psychology.com for now thank you very much for listening see you next time