Dog Behavior Blog

Puppies Know What Pointing Means

The other day I was playing ball with my Standard Poodle, Raja. Ball is one of his favorite games. The rules are simple. He brings me the ball and expects me to pry it out of his teeth and throw it down the length of the kitchen. If I am being uncooperative about extracting the ball from his mouth, he will eventually let go of the ball so that it falls into my hand, and will nudge my hand with his nose, letting me know that I am being remiss in my part of the game. Occasionally I try to fool him, and throw the ball not into the kitchen, but into the living room.  By the time I do this, he has already run along part of the length of the kitchen, expecting to catch the ball. He stops and looks around in all directions, trying to see where the ball went, a puzzled expression on his face. I then relent and point to where I threw the ball. As soon as I point, he runs in that direction and quickly finds it.

I never knew how and when he caught on to my pointing. Now a recent study in the journal Animal Behaviour shows that puppies as young as 6 weeks old understand what pointing means (J. Riedel, K. Schumann, J. Kaminski, J. Call, and M. Tomasello, 2008, The early ontogeny of human-dog communication, Animal Behaviour 75: 1003-1014). The study did several experiments with groups of puppies that were 6-, 8-, 16-, and 24-weeks-old.  One of the experiments involved having one person hold on to the dog while another person sat in front of the dog and pointed and looked at one of two inverted cups where food had previously been placed. The other cup was empty, and both cups had been smeared with food to try to eliminate odor cues.  All of the puppies, including the 6-week-old ones, correctly chose some 80 percent of the time the cup that had the food and had been pointed to by the experimenter.

In another experiment, a visual marker was used. As before, there were two cups, one empty and one containing food. The experimenter showed the dog a visual marker, a black and white piece of wood, and then placed the marker on the cup with the food and looked at the marker while the dog was released to choose a cup. All the puppies did extremely well, getting the correct cup at better than 80 percent of the time, and the 24-week-old puppies scoring 100 percent correct on this experiment.

Prior to these experiments, other experiments with adult dogs showed that the dogs were quite good at picking up on pointing cues. What was a surprise was that dogs as young as 6-weeks were also able to respond to pointing. It suggests that the process of domestication must have selected for traits that allowed humans and dogs to communicate from the time the dogs were very young. Interestingly, neither wolves nor apes are very good at picking up on pointing cues provided by humans.  Although from a genetic standpoint wolves and dogs are very closely related, studies such as this one suggest that we cannot look to wolf behavior to help explain the behavior of our dogs.

--Con Slobodchikoff

Dog Tricks For Visits To The Veterinarian

Many dogs do not exhibit their best behavior at the vet?s office, which makes visits there a lot less fun for everyone. Objections to receiving medical care can take the form of unruly behavior, signs of stress like salivating excessively or shaking, and even aggression. The worse your dog's behavior is, the harder it is for the vets and vet techs to examine and treat your dog, which makes the visits even longer, which can make your dog's behavior even worse.

One of the best ways to make visits to the vet better for everyone is to teach your dog to perform certain behaviors that he will need to do while at the office and in the examining room. Training your dog to do the things that he will need to do at the vet's can help avoid the stress of being physically manipulated. For example, teach your dog to step up onto a small platform when asked so that he can perform this same "trick" on the scale at the vet's. So many dogs get pushed and prodded up onto the scale with frustration and anxiety resulting in all parties, and this is largely unnecessary.

Another thing to teach a dog is to go "belly up" for abdominal exams. Many dogs get disoriented if placed in this position, and this discomfort can result in fear, anxiety, aggression, and an exam that is too harried to be useful. If you practice having your dog lie on his back with his legs spread out away from his body, it will become less alarming for your dog to assume this posture for an exam. Once your dog can do this on cue, get him used to being touched on his belly while in this position so that he will not be surprised when the vet touches him after he does this trick. As a biologist who is easily amused, I taught my dog to perform this trick to the cue, "Boy or girl"?

Many dogs react badly at the vet when their paw is grabbed, but this is something that commonly needs to be done in order to draw blood. Some dogs seem to dislike the feeling of a paw being held, others seem to feel off balance if the paw is taken while in a standing position, and still other dogs just don?t like to be touched without warning. Teaching your dog to "shake" in order to get them to present a paw greatly increases the likelihood that this procedure will go more smoothly. A dog who has been taught to shake will not be surprised by having their paw taken, will tend to sit before presenting their paw, and many get used to how it feels during the repetition that is so essential in training any new skill. For maximum effectiveness, work up to holding onto your dog's paw for a long time (up to a minute) when you practice this at home so that when your dog?s paw is held for longer than a moment at the vet's, it will not be the first time he experiences a longer shake than is typical.

I am willing to bet that all small animal veterinarians would be ecstatic if every dog could reliably perform a "down/stay." This would make vaccinations, exams, and anything else that requires the dog to remain still (which includes a lot of treatments!) easier, more effective, and faster. This is a great skill for so many practical purposes in life, and making vet visits better is at the top of the list.

Besides making visits to the vet less objectionable for everyone, training your dog to perform these behaviors on cue shortens the time it takes the vets and vet techs to do what they need to do. This efficiency will leave you more time to discuss any concerns you have about your dog with the veterinarian. Many people resist taking their dogs to the vet even when they know their dog needs medical care, simply because the experience is so dreadful for everyone. Dogs benefit greatly from regular visits to the vet as well as emergency ones, which is why training them specifically to handle this part of their life should be a fundamental part of all dogs' education.

---Karen London

Great Reads For Serious Dog Lovers

I get phone calls and e-mails all the time from people asking me how they can learn more about the field of canine behavior. My answers always include academic study, attending seminars, actually training dogs to a high level in some area for fun or competition, and reading everything possible on the subject. I find that people are most eager to pursue the reading avenue, possibly because it is easy to get access to books, and this is one inexpensive option that has the advantage of being doable in the comfort of home. Naturally, the next question is always what books are best. The general answer is to read widely from a variety of authors, but the specific books change as new books get published. Here are some of my favorite picks for great dog books to read.

If you want to know more about training in general, I have two favorites. Family Friendly Dog Training: A Six Week Program for You and Your Dog by Patricia B. McConnell and Aimee M. Moore is based on a six-week curriculum for beginning dog training classes, and covers the basics every dog should know and how to teach to teach them in a step-by-step way. Excel-erated Learning: Explaining in plain English how dogs learn and how best to teach them covers learning theory and how it applies to dog training.

If you want to learn more about the science of canine behavior, consider delving into The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People, which is edited by James Serpell or The Behavioural Biology of Dogs which is edited by P. Jensen. Both of these books contain chapters on a range of topics from the world?s top scientists and their studies of all things canine. Steven Lindsay's three volume set entitled Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date.

If your desire is to learn about specific topics or areas of problem behavior, there are arrange of possibilities, depending on exactly which issues you need to know more about. Patricia McConnell has a series of booklets on a variety of topics. Some of her titles are The Cautious Canine: How to Help Dogs Conquer Their Fears, Feeling Outnumbered: How to Manage and Enjoy Your Multi-Dog Household, I?ll Be Home Soon: How to Prevent and Treat Separation Anxiety, and Feisty Fido: Help for the Leash Aggressive Dog.

Other great specialty books include Raising Puppies & Kids Together: A Guide for Parents by Pia Silvani and Lynn Eckhardt, Visiting the Dog Park?Having Fun, Staying Safe by Cheryl Smith, and Help! I'm Barking and I Can?t Be Quiet by Daniel Q. Estep and Suzanne Hetts.

For books that combine moving, educational stories with practical, useful information and scientific backup for everything in the books, there are several books to consider. Patricia McConnell's The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs explains the human side of behavior within the dog-human relationship. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication examines the mutualistic relationship between humans and other animals, including dogs and debunks the old-fashioned idea that these relationships were good only for the humans and that the humans imposed it on animals. The Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz' Man Meets Dog is an amazing foray into the ideas and speculation of a great scientist as he contemplates his own dogs and their behavior.

For some great reads that are literary and enjoyable as well as informative, consider James Herriot?s Dog Stories, which is an insightful and delightful collection of adventures in the life of a country vet in Yorkshire England. His stories are probably the most charming animal tales that have ever been written. Caroline Knapp?s book Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs is about one woman?s quest for love and how she finally found the intimacy that had eluded her in all her previous relationships when she adopted a dog. Have tissues on hand. Dog is My Co-Pilot is a wonderful volume of essays by professional writers about every facet of sharing our lives with dogs.

Finally, a couple of classic reads are books that everybody serious about dog training behavior has read, or at least should read. The books Genetics and the Social Behavior and the Dog by John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller and The New Knowledge of Dog Behavior by Clarence Pfaffenberger both explain the classic studies and breeding programs that informed our current views on the heritability of behavioral traits in dogs, critical socialization periods, and the effects of emotional traits on performance.

Karen Pryor's book Don't Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training brought a whole new perspective on positive training methods to the entire dog training world, and wins my personal vote for the best book title ever.

If you are interested in reading dog books of any kind, there is a single website that is worth checking out. It is called Dogwise.com, but in my house we call it the hide-your-credit-card site because I love it so much and spend so much money there.

--Karen B. London

Rico, The Dog Who Understands Words

Wouldn’t it be nice to talk to our dogs and know that they understood every word we say? I talk to my dog all the time, and I have some limited proof that he understands some of what I am saying to him. When I say, “Where’s your ball?’ he goes and gets his ball, when I say “Do you want to go outside/” he runs to the front door, and when I say, “Are you hungry?” he wags his tail vigorously and runs around in circles. However, all of that doesn’t have to mean that he understands what I am saying. It could merely be operant conditioning at work. He might have learned to associate a particular set of sounds with a response that results in a reward.

Now we have Rico, a 9-year-old border collie (at the time) who was tested by rigorous experiments and found to understand the meanings of about 200 different words. In a report in the journal Science (J. Kaminski, J. Call, J. Fischer, 2004, Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for “fast mapping,” Science 304: 1682-1683), Rico was tested for his ability to retrieve objects that he had never seen before. The experimenters took some pains to make sure that there was no subtle cueing going on. In one experiment, Rico and his person waited in another room while the experimenters arranged at random some of the 200 objects whose names he knew, in groups of 10 objects per time. Then Rico was asked by his person to bring two of the objects, that neither he nor his person could see directly. Rico successfully brought 37 out of 40 objects that were requested. In another experiment, a novel item, that Rico had not seen before or knew the word for, was placed with 7 objects that Rico knew, and his person asked him to bring the novel object, saying the word for the object. Out of 10 such sessions, Rico was successful 7 times. Finally, four weeks after he was exposed to the words for the novel objects, he was asked to retrieve one of those objects from a group of 4 familiar objects, 4 objects that he had never seen before, and the novel object that he was asked to retrieve a month before. Rico brought back the correct object 3 out of 6 times, a rate that the experimenters say compares well with how humans remember the names of objects.

So it seems that Rico actually knows the words that stand for specific objects. As one commentator has pointed out (P. Bloom, 2004, Can a dog learn a word?, Science 304: 1605-1606), Rico knows only 200 words, while a 9-year-old child knows thousands of words. However, let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that dogs have a language that they use to communicate with other dogs. Then we can ask: Just how many words of dog language do WE know?

--Con Slobodchikoff