Neanderthals didn’t live with puppies.However homo sapiens It has been doing so for thousands of years. The protection that wolves and dogs provided early humans probably contributed to why we thrived and why Neanderthals ultimately didn’t. Ng presents this argument, homo sapiens Unlike other primates, it is curiously dog-like. Like dogs, we have learned to hunt in packs and have same-sex friendships. Grandin explains that as dogs became domesticated, their brains shrunk. But it wasn’t just the dog’s brain that was changed.When the fossil record shows homo sapiens give a dog (or possibly a wolf) a formal burial, our My brain was shrinking. Is it because the dog did the job of sniffing us and keeping an eye on us? And can we plan for them? There’s a lot of debate about how, when and why this happened, but as much as we’ve domesticated dogs. In this way, dogs may have domesticated us as well.

Alexandra Horowitz, principal scientist in the Canine Cognition Lab at Barnard University, conducted a longitudinal observational study of a dog during its first year of life. Canis lupus familyisIn other words, like many others, Horowitz got a pandemic puppy. She and her family named this puppy her Quiddity or Quid, which means “essence.” She chronicles this in her amazingly adorable cover book, The Year of the Puppy.

Horowitz already had two dogs, a cat, and a son, so her motivation for getting a puppy is somewhat convincingly shown to be a service to science. Horowitz has written several popular books on dogs and dog science.In her new book, Horowitz’s goal is to teach puppies not to rush at children and not increase the household’s paper towel budget. Instead, she aims to try to better understand young dogs, from day one to day 365, as beings in transition. She wants to write about puppies. developmentally.

Horowitz gets in touch with a woman who is raising a pregnant rescue dog. She meets her mother dog. She will visit the puppy as soon as it is born. And as she continues her visits, she watches as puppies transform from blind creatures piling up for warmth to walking, playing, and individualized beings. be involved in the investigation. Did you know that one study evaluated that puppies reach their peak cuteness around eight weeks of age? This is when mothers, who have been extremely doting since birth, can begin to get annoyed with their puppies. Did you know that? Puppies are then able to learn skills from other dogs and from almost any dog ​​except their mother. Even free-ranging dogs tend to move away from their mothers. Puppies form longer lasting bonds with their siblings.

All of this makes humans feel pretty okay about depriving puppies from their mothers. I myself took puppies from their mothers during the pandemic. Actually he is two. I shared with my partner a series of encouraging words from Horowitz’s book.

“Hmm. Are you sure it’s not all nonsense?” he asked.

“She runs a dog cognition lab!”

he sighed.But he showed me Twitter Position If treats sliced ​​into uneven pieces are offered to dogs, they will snatch the larger pieces. We then find out she took it to a baby creature that was previously off-screen. pretty! It can be confirmed that living with puppies causes the brain to atrophy.

Weird and fun facts about a puppy’s first few weeks of life may intrigue brains of any size. Puppies who have had more contact with their mothers during childhood may grow up to be more ‘exploring’ dogs and more likely to be ‘people-oriented’ dogs. It deepens our relationship with things and objects,” writes Horowitz. Somewhere the ghost of Donald Winnicott nods in agreement.

The most compelling puppy study in the book, usually known as the Superdog Program, comes from a study conducted by the U.S. military. was included. From the pup’s third to sixteenth day of life, humans held the pup in five different poses for three to five seconds at a time. The hope was to make a better working dog. This is the accepted method of raising puppies that can grow into more relaxed dogs.

Similar early interventions in a puppy’s life are what make some dogs “natural” shepherds. There is none. Instead, they are transferred from birth into the living space with their future mate species at about nine weeks of age. Horowitz writes that although he doesn’t think he’s a sheep, “he will behave like a dog. All his friends are sheep-shaped.” She shares the example of Chihuahuas raised among cats. Eventually, they exhibited seemingly cat-like behavior.

This apparent exchange of alliances is not as artificial as one might think. One study of free-ranging mother dogs showed that puppies often had aromathers (females who cared for them but were not their biological mothers). In this way, puppies differ from ducks and geese that are famous for imprinting on the first person or thing they see, even the eventual Nobel laureate with a bushy beard named Conrad Lorenz. .

A side effect of reading the Horowitz Puppy book is that you may start looking for opportunities to use some of the puppy science vocabulary in casual conversation. You may already know that hair is called a “furnishing item”. But did you know that the adorable way very young puppies find their way by blindly clinging to every surface is called “thigmotaxis”? I call it “flamening” (animals use to bring hormones (pheromones) into a special vomeronasal organ located under the nose and on the palate for sniffing). such, often grotesque facial expressions), but was repulsed in a Fremen-like fashion.

Once puppies hit puberty, the amount of scientific research revealing cute facts about puppies dwindles. There aren’t many words to describe puppy puberty. From the ‘puppy’ cliff, straight across to the ‘dog’. There are not many studies on puberty in dogs. Although I know there is a sharp increase in dogs giving up on dogs as they hit puberty. One study concluded that dogs who spent more time in the kennel during childhood were more likely to fail guide dog training than dogs who spent less time in the kennel, with longer stays in the kennel leading to higher rates of failure. attached. These dogs fail because they are more afraid of new situations and new people.

Horowitz describes a moment of Quid’s adolescent rebellion. She calls out Quid’s name and Quid looks her in the eye and walks in the opposite direction looking protesting. She picks up a stick that is too big to handle. These apparent acts of defiance are touching, in contrast to Sharpie Pen’s innocent annihilation when she was just a puppy. For the most part, Horowitz avoids giving puppy training or other advice. She argues that we should think not just about how to make our pets better, but how to be better pet parents. You have to run, you have to walk, you have to play. To get an idea of ​​how far our pets like to travel, consider a study of Italian wolves that walked 38 kilometers in one night. Another study showed a Cape Cod coyote that in one night he walked 31 kilometers.

A minor subplot in Horowitz’s book is her other pets and humans, and how she reacts to Quid’s presence. Several times she mentions that she feels she’s not in love with Quid yet.At first I read this as the writers need to find an angle. But eventually I came to think it was more sincere. That year, Finnegan, her one of her dogs, weakens. The afterword says that both Finnegan and Upton, the dogs she had when she adopted Quid, died just four weeks apart. The idea was a psychological screen. It was all about the need to be tamed. ♦