Book Notes: "For the Love of a Dog"

I'm starting a very irregular feature called Book Notes. I have a poor memory and have trouble remembering the interesting facts or bits of trivia I read in great non-fiction books like Blink or Freakonomics.

Book Notes will be a list of some of these facts and bits of trivia. The first book is For the Love of a Dog by Patricia B. McConnell.

The book is about the science behind the emotional life of dogs. Along the way she ties in a lot of human psychology and retells interesting experiments on dogs and other animals. It is an excellent book for anyone who has a dog, or human/animal psychology in general.

"Wolves will always feed their puppies, even if they themselves are starving. Lions eat first, letting their young starve if there is enough food." (pg 22)

"Behaviorists and trainers hear, almost on a daily basis, that a client's dog must have been abused, because she reacts so fearfully to strangers, However, many of these dogs are just shy, and they aren't any more comfortable around unfamiliar strangers than shy people are." (pg 118)

"Researchers have found that people who express no preference for using one hand or the other have higher than expected levels of generalized anxiety disorders." (pg 119) [Well, of course. They don't know which hand to use.]

"In just a few generations, they'd bred a group of rats who were able to move through a complicated maze in no time, especially compared with the "dull" group, who were bred for their lackluster performance. Only there was one problem--it turned out that the "bright" and "dull" rats weren't at all different in their ability to solve problems. The "dull" rats were simply afraid of new environments, and when placed in one were less likely to explore than the "bright" ones were." (pg 123)

(reworded) Pavlov's motivation for wanting dogs to drool was so he could study the extra-large chromosomes that saliva contains. (pg 147)

"Monkeys can learn to be afraid of snakes just by watching a video of other monkeys acting fearfully around them, but they don't make the same association if you edit the video and replace the snakes with flowers." (pg 151)

"On a lighter side, rats have also been found to produce a vocalization during play that for all the world sounds like the equivalent of human laughter. Biologist Jaak Panksepp found that these chirping noises are associated with responses in the brain correlated with pleasure, that they occur during play, and that they can be elicited, believe it or not, by tickling from human caretakers. The tickled rats even began to seek out their human playmates and became socially bonded to them." (pg 215)

"People whose brains have naturally lower levels of dopamine have trouble feeling that anything is 'enough' to satisfy them, and often indulge in high-risk behavior in a desperate attempt to feel contentment." (pg 215-216)

"...the psychologist Nathan A. Fox found that 'exuberant' four-month-old babies (babies who became especially happy and excited by novel events; about 10 percent of the ones studied) had the same level of joyfulness at seven years of age as in infancy." (pg 216)

"Our perception of happiness even seems to be affected by the biology of sleep/wake cycles. In most people, happiness is highest between four and ten hours after getting up, and lowest at the beginning and end off our day." (pg 216) [She later makes the point that research also suggests we have significant influence on our levels of happiness, outside of our genetic baggage]

"The tendency to feel excited and energized when anticipating something was first discovered by Wolfram Schultz, who trained monkeys to press a lever for a food reward. The experiment included a light that came on right before the food was released. Schultz found that the monkeys' brains had the highest levels of dopamine right after the light came on, but before the food was released. That means that the monkeys were more excited when they were anticipating the food than they were when they actually got it." (pg 221)

"However, in dog language, the direct stare and forward movement is a stopping signal, one that means the opposite of what we intend. Your dog is much more likely to come if you turn your body sideways and move backward a bit while you call 'Come!' " (pg 226)

"Lord knows dogs are an evolutionary success story: just compare the numbers of dogs in any given country with the numbers of wolves." (65 million dogs, a few thousand wolves) (pg 246) (This note is for myself. This passage gave me an idea for a skit that takes place a few hundred years ago. A dog pulls a wolf aside and politely hints that the wolf should start being nicer to humans for his own sake. "DOG: Look, all I'm saying is that they got these things called guns, and it wouldn't hurt to lick their faces one in a while.")

"One researcher taught dogs to select the larger of two objects to get a food treat, regardless of the shape or composition of the object." (pg 264)

(reworded) Dogs watched items being placed by a screen, one by one. When the screen was lifted, the dogs stared longer at the objects if it was the "wrong" number of objects than if it were the number of objects they expected. The experiment was originally done with babies, who have a similar response starting around 5-months-old. (pg 265)

(reworded) This is one of my favorite dog experiments. The author mentions it on pg 267.

"Fighters and poker players are famous for being able to control the expressions on their faces, for obvious reasons. Perhaps that's why dogs descended from fighting lines are also often difficult to read--fighters of any species aren't negotiating or communicating. they're trying to disguise their own emotions while looking for an opening to attack." (pg 284)