Decoding the canine mind.

Decoding the canine mind.
There is no official census for dogs and cats, but in 2016, the American Veterinary Medical Association estimated that 59% of households in the United States had a pet. While the number of dogs and cats remains debatable, dogs continue to gain popularity with 38% of households having at least one. Families with children are even more likely to have a dog (55%). With all due respect to cats, dogs have insinuated themselves into human society, forming deep emotional bonds with us and forcing us to feed and shelter them. Worldwide, the dog population is approaching one billion, most of them free-roaming.
Although many people are convinced that they know what their dog is thinking, little is really known about what is going on in dogs' heads. This may be surprising because the field of experimental psychology was born with Pavlov and his salivating dogs. But as dogs gained traction as domestic animals, in many cases reaching the status of family members, their use as research subjects fell into disuse. In large part, this was a result of the Animal Welfare Act of 1966, which set standards for the treatment of animals in research and ended the practice of stealing pets for experimentation.
How strange then that these creatures, whose closest relatives are wolves, live with us and even share our beds, but we know almost nothing about what they are thinking. In the last decade, however, the situation has begun to change and we are in the midst of a renaissance of canine cognitive science. Research labs have sprung up all over the world, and dogs are participating not as unwitting subjects, but as partners in scientific discovery. This new research is beginning to shed light on what it is like to be a dog and the nature of the dog-human bond.
When scientists use animals in research, they usually turn to species that are closely related to humans. "Closely related" is relative, since even chimpanzees and bonobos diverged from hominids at least 5 million years ago. Apes diverged about 25 million years ago, and to find a common ancestor with the dog - indeed with any carnivore - you need to go back 97 million years.
But this summary ignores what makes dogs special: their evolution was altered to make them more socially compatible with us than any other animal. They were, in fact, the first animal to be domesticated. The million dollar questions are when and where this happened. We know that dogs existed at the time of the first human settlements in the eastern Mediterranean.
The world that these early dogs and humans inhabited looked quite different from ours. Although the last ice age was ending, the climate was still colder than now. This probably led the wolves (an ancestor of the dog) to more frequent contact with humans as the ice sheets receded. One theory is that wolves and humans helped each other hunt.
The evolution of cooperation is what allowed humans to dominate the planet, and at the dawn of civilization we extended our ability to cooperate with each other to another species: dogs. While there is no fossil record of the behavior, there is growing genetic evidence for this type of coevolution.
In 2017, a team of researchers found a correlation between sociability in dogs with variants of several genes that had already been identified in Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS), a rare genetic disorder in humans.
So what is going on in a dog's head? The traditional approach, started by Pavlov, is to measure a dog's behavior in different circumstances and try to infer why it does what it does. But consider a common example: teaching a dog to fetch. Some dogs, such as retrievers, can do this instinctively, but others cannot. Is this because the non-performers don't understand what is being asked of them? Or is it that they understand, but would rather do something else? It is very tempting to project a human explanation onto the dog, to anthropomorphize.
We should be careful when generalizing about dog findings, because there is no such thing as a generic dog. Just as there is no such thing as a generic human.
Because of the limits of behavior interpretation, my colleagues and I have resorted to using brain imaging to find out what dogs are really thinking.
It is worth keeping in mind, however, that dogs are not simply treatments to be prescribed for various conditions. Just like people, dogs have a wide variety of abilities and personalities. And while there are some differences between breeds in any particular personality trait, there seems to be just as much variability within a breed.