Inside the Mind of A Dog 🧠 🐶

Issue #95

August 27th, 2024

Quick Hits:

🥼 Are you an early startup in the pet space? Leap Venture Studio 2025 is open for applications

🧘‍♀️ Homeopathic and holistic medicine - a growing trend among some pet parents

💔 Not property, family. That is the argument this bereaved dog owner from New York wants to put forward

🖋️ Bark’s third annual National Dog Day tattoo contest is finally here

This week we hand the reins over to Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, two of the world’s leading doggie scientists(yes, that’s the technical title).

Brian Hare is a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist and runs the Duke Puppy Kindergarten. Together, they co-authored the book Puppy Kindergarten, and are featured in the Netflix special, Inside the Mind of a Dog. 

How can the new science of dog cognition help the pet industry strengthen the bond between pets and their owners? 

In our new book, Puppy Kindergarten, we argue that we are currently experiencing the biggest cultural shift in dog ownership in centuries. Those in the pet business who are aware of this shift will have an advantage over those left behind. 

Only a generation ago, like children, most dogs were unleashed, free to wander the neighborhood, chase cars or cyclists, and mostly do what they liked during the day. At night, dogs mostly slept outside, since before the 1990s, if your dog slept in your bed, you would probably both wake up covered in fleas. 

Veterinary advances and a shift in families waiting longer and having fewer children meant that dogs have become very much part of the family. This is wonderful in many ways, but just as the way we raise kids has changed, so has the way we raise dogs. Dogs are rarely off-leash, so pet parents are much more involved with making sure their dog gets enough exercise, taking them to good behavior classes, and making sure they are properly socialized. Following this ‘hands-on’ method of pet parenting, parents are more interested in understanding how their dogs think and see the world, and also in interacting with their dogs in a deeper way. 

This is where science can help. Dog cognition is the science of how dogs think. At the Duke Puppy Kindergarten, we run the largest ongoing experiment on how the puppy mind develops. We’ve made several key discoveries, including that puppies have multiple intelligences and exactly when these intelligences, also known as cognitive skills, come online. This comes in handy, for example, when it comes to a cognitive skill like self-control. 

To test self-control, you put a treat inside a clear cylinder covered with a cloth and open it on both ends. Dogs quickly learn to go around the open end. Then you remove the cloth and the cylinder becomes see-through. You might think this makes the game easier because you’ve just given the dog more information. But in fact, the test becomes harder: in order to win the game, each puppy must go around the cylinder without nudging it to get inside in order to retrieve the treat. 

In puppies, we have found that self-control only starts to develop when puppies are around 3 months old. A lack of self-control impacts behavior like teething; we have found that 12 weeks old, when self-control has only just started to develop and teething is in full swing, is the time when puppies need teething toys the most. The timing and emergence of self-control is also important to note for training – since training usually asks a puppy to do something when they would rather do something else.  

Another one of our discoveries is the individual variability in puppies. We enrolled 101 puppies in Puppy Kindergarten. There were puppy geniuses and puppies who couldn’t pass the tests that were designed for pigeons. Then, some puppies did really well in one area but were hopeless in the next. We already developed an online platform called Dognition, where owners can play the same kind of games with their dogs that we play with our puppies and find out what kind of thinker their dog is. 

Or the product could improve one of these cognitive skills. For instance, one of our games is called the impossible task. You simply lock a treat inside a container. The test is not whether the puppy can get the treat but what they do when they realize the task is impossible. Some puppies try to solve the problem independently, while others will try to get you to help them. We found that puppies who played this game for five minutes every 2 weeks made double the amount of eye contact than puppies who did not. Eye contact is important for bonding between dogs and their owners. Dogs who make more eye contact get adopted faster out of shelters. Owners of dogs who make more eye contact report having a deeper relationship. 

Developing games based on the new science of dog cognition is a largely untapped market. There are different ways for owners to play with their dogs than the traditional games of fetch and tug. Dognition games are a way for people to learn the kind of personality their dog has. Are they independent problem solvers, or do they ask for help? Are they empathically connected or are they more wolf-like in the way they relate to their human families? A forward-thinking product developer might design toys for these different cognitive profiles -  games that play to a dog’s strengths.

As researchers' discoveries reveal more about the way dogs think and see the world, consumers will want products tailored to their dog’s individuality. An opportunity exists for the pet industry to explore the cognitive differences that make each dog unique and ultimately strengthen the bond between dogs and their owners. 

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Finally, Why did the dog go to the bank?

To make a de-paws-it.

See you Friday!