Interview with Julie Hecht, Manager of Horowitz Dog Cognition Labs, Barnard College

WHAT ATTRACTS YOU TO YOUR DOG?

Julie Hecht is the lab manager of the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College and the author of Dog Spies, a blog in Scientific American. She is a doctoral student in animal behavior and comparative psychology who has been working with Dr. Alexandra Horowitz since 2010 on the study of dog behavior and cognition.

I spoke with Hecht about their study “Seeing Dogs:Human Preferences for Dog Physical Attributes,” published in the March 2015 issue of Anthrozoös. Hecht, who is interested in dog welfare, said she and Dr. Horowitz wanted to better understand what attracts people to dogs.

Q. WHAT LED YOU TO DO THIS STUDY?

We were interested in the question of how and why people anthropomorphize dogs. We anthropomorphize everything—we see the human expression all over the place. With dogs, we make incredibly grand and in some cases aggravated attributions. You read such things in the American Kennel Club descriptions of dogs. (ed. Note: AKC describes a Pekingese, for example, as “regal in manner” and a Cocker Spaniel as “soft and appealing.”) You might [also] see a dog described as “large-eyed” and other attributes attached to the way a dog looks, instead of talking about how a dog behaves. But if a dog looks regal, that’s not telling you anything.

We wanted to test whether there are particular physical attributes that people are attracted to when they look at dog’s faces. So this is probably more a human study—except that the way humans make attributions to dogs can affect the human-dog relationship.

Q.  HOW DID THE STUDY WORK?

We took 80 image pairs of adult dogs—and they were all mixed-breed dogs—and we considered 14 different physical attributions, so described in the study. There were baby-like, or paedomorphic, features: Things like bigger eyes, a larger cranium, a wider forehead, space between the eyes. We also considered some more humanlike attributes, such as a smile, colored irises, or an upturn of mouth. Some other considerations were symmetry and the presence of piebald coloration.

Then we modified each image within a very small change so the two images looked nearly the same, but were slightly different. Each image pair presentation explored only one modified attribute. And we asked our subjects to choose which of the two images they preferred.

Which do you prefer?

Q.  WHAT WAS THE OUTCOME?

Ultimately, we found that certain infantile features—not all, though—were attractive to people, as were certain human features. The subjects tended to like dogs that had slightly larger eyes, wider-set eyes, colored irises, and the upturned smile, even though such a smile might not mean the same thing behaviorally as it appears. Dogs do smile. For example, when a dog is “smiling” or pulling back its commissure, a person might say that dog is a happy dog. But if its ears are also back but it is “smiling” it is a scared dog. Or if the ears are pressing forward, these are behavioral characteristics of an angry dog.

People did not prefer dog images with an enlarged (infantile) head.

Q. WHY DOES IT MATTER HOW PEOPLE PERCEIVE A DOG’S APPEARANCE?

As I said earlier, the way a dog looks can affect the human-dog relationship. Our report states it so: “Our research could have implications for dog welfare. A recent ASPCA study found that people often adopt cats based on their behavior while dogs are often selected based on their appearance."

"Animal rescue organizations can be cognizant of this phenomenon when presenting images of adoptable dogs. In line with the current study, animal rescue groups might consider incorporating preferred, salient features into their adoptable dog pictures—a picture of a dog with colored irises and a distinct ‘smile’ could be viewed preferentially. Further research could show whether aesthetic preferences might motivate potential adopters to meet a dog.”

Q.  I ASSUME YOU HAVE OWNED DOGS. WHY HAVE YOU DECIDED TO STUDY THEM AS WELL?

Yes, I’ve been a dog owner. I got involved in ethology, the study of animal behavior, because I think I just didn’t like the idea of taking what is known about animals at face value. And I got interested in thinking about animal welfare, now a guiding theme in all of my work.

In some ways, even this study can relate to animal welfare, because in some cases we are breeding dogs with exaggerated features because people are attracted those features. But the morphology of features we are breeding—because people are buying it—are not always best for the health and well being of the dogs.

To try to put dogs on the same page with humans is an incorrect assumption. They live in a different cognitive, social, and sensory world. And yet dogs are incredibly attentive to the people that matter to them. As a species, they really do integrate much better than other species—cows, pigs, chickens—on our terms.

Interviewing Julie opened my eyes to the need for more human-dog research. The Horowitz Dog Cognition Labs have their own web page where you can follow their past, present, and future projects and where you can even sign up to have your dog involved in ongoing studies. Thanks, Julie. 

July 4th, Not Fun for Skunky

 My friend Gina found her dog, Skunky, on the streets of Patterson, New Jersey as a pup some 13 years ago. She suspects that he’d been used as a “bait dog” for dogfights, because he was always cowering down, scared of just about everything, but especially men’s loud voices.

Skunky, a black Labrador mix, is better around men now but is still deathly afraid of thunder from a rainstorm, or any loud series of noises—construction sites, jackhammers, or fireworks. Whenever those happen, he begins to shake, and he has to run to Gina and stay right by her side, in order to calm down.

So this year, before July 4th’s firecracker insanity infiltrates her New Jersey neighborhood, Gina bought Skunky a ThunderShirt.

ThunderShirt is a dog anxiety shirt, designed to calm nervous dogs. It follows the same logic as swaddling a baby—that it makes the animal feel enveloped and safe. The shirt goes around the dog’s belly and around its upper chest area, so it feels like it is being hugged from the pressure of the wrap, which is as comforting to dogs as it is to humans. 

Wrap it tight, but not too tight.

The manufacturers boast an 80 percent success rate with dogs that wear them. And Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University, a best-selling author, had astudy accepted last year in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior on the effect of ThunderShirts on anxious dogs’ heart rates and behavior. The study looked at 90 dogs, some of which wore the ThunderShirt and some that did not, and determined that the heart rates of those with the shirts remained steadier.

Gina found out about ThunderShirt through a friend who claims that, when she puts it on her anxious dog, her dog literally sighs with relief.

I’m not here to plug ThunderShirt so please know that it is not the only product on the market that uses the same logic to calm dogs. There are others, including StormDefender and Anxiety Wrap. There will probably be more to come, too.

Skunky has not yet had the opportunity to wear his new threads for a special occasion, but the holiday weekend should offer the perfect moment for ThunderShirt to prove its worth.

For other ways to calm your dog during fireworks, here's thatmutt, a great blog on dogs.

Inside of a Dog

Can your dog "smell sadness" in you?

Behavioral scientist Alexandra Horowitz says it can. I hope to reference Horowitz' 2010 book, Inside of a Dog, at least a few times in these blogposts because it presents an extraordinary look at why dogs behave as they do.

The book's blurb entices us to her scientific and anecdotal studies of dogs through popular teases. (Why must a person on a bicycle be chased? Why do dogs lick your face?)

To me, the most fascinating factoid about dogs I learned from the book is that they have an incredible sense of smell. While we humans have five million olfactory cells, the average dog has nearly 200 million of them, and oftentimes more. That means that more of their brain is dedicated to processing these smells, and that what eyes are to us, the nose is to them.

Among other things Horowitz reveals is that dogs:

• Can smell all the food in the house.

• Can smell distinctive emotions of their owners -- anxiety, sadness, joy, fear—through human skin, sweat, breath, and hormones.
• Can smell differences in the various times of the day.
• Can smell the onset of a rainstorm

• Will nuzzle against you not precisely because it loves you but to collect your scent it sticks to its wet nose

Dogs, in fact, have two olfactory organs. Besides their nose, they have a vomeronasal organ inside of the nose (so do reptiles) that helps them re-smell smells with renewed intensity, keeping the scents fresh. This is why they are good trackers. This is also why they can smell their owners on articles of clothing, or shoes, or (in the case of my dog) the sofa. And that's why they chew our things. Call it an expression of missing us.

Because their noses are so ultra sensitive, dogs are also being used nowadays for early detection of cancer in humans (but this topic deserves its own blog entry).

So, to answer the question above, yes they can, although it is just one of a few ways they understand the moods of us, their "Top Dogs."

Horowitz runs a dog cognition lab at Barnard College in New York, and posts her research on Facebook. Here's a fun site; click on the photo link below and then check out the various "windows" of doggie information.

http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/features/map-of-a-dog