Inside the Mind of a Dog

We think we know what's going on inside the mind of a dog.

But new discoveries suggest we may not know the whole story.

Dogs have found their way into every corner of our lives.

- There he is. - Hi, baby!

Hi! Hi, Toulouse.

- They're our companions. - Good dog.

- Our saviors. - Here, Lassie, take it to Gramps.

Our pop-culture icons.

Peter, you hear that?

Scooby-Doo!

And yet we're only beginning to understand

how their brains actually work.

For a long time, scientists felt

like dogs weren't really worthy of scientific study.

But now, canine science is really blossoming.

Puppy! Look!

That big aha moment happened

when people started using methods that had been developed to use with kids...

...to uncover and unlock the secrets of the dog social world.

- - Bravissimo!

So how did dogs and humans become so hopelessly intertwined?

I do think my dog loves me,

and I think there is scientific evidence to back that up.

New science is helping to decode their strange behavior,

decipher their hidden language...

...and discover why dogs are the way they are.

Understanding the mind of dogs is really an incredibly useful thing,

not just to enrich our relationships with them,

but to understand ourselves better.

We can all get closer to our dogs

if we know their secrets.

Dogs are the single most diverse animal to ever walk the earth.

Given how different dogs look from one another,

you can imagine that if an alien from another planet landed,

it could be confused.

It would be really easy to think that a Chihuahua and a Great Dane

are completely different things.

The history of where dog breeds come from is really fascinating.

There are breeds that were bred originally in Asia,

Africa, or the Americas.

Most of the breeds that we recognize today

are gonna be 100, 125 years old.

Until the late 1800s, dogs were primarily bred for work,

when a new phenomenon took over the dog world.

Vanity.

Instead of having iPhones or Louis Vuitton bags,

people started to breed dogs to communicate status.

Then other people wanted dogs of that same breed,

and they became popular.

In Scotland, the first golden retriever

was believed to be an undesirable mutation

from a long line of bird dogs.

But the eccentric Lord Tweedmouth liked the new color

and bred him with other soft, red dogs,

creating a brand-new breed.

For decades,

the most popular breed has been the Labrador Retriever.

But in 2022, the French bulldog surpassed the Lab in the US.

So how exactly did our most popular pet

become such a valuable member of the family?

To understand that, we need to start at the very beginning.

So where do dogs come from?

Whoa, that's a... fun one.

The scientific name of the domestic dog, our best buddies,

is Canis familiaris.

The scientific name of a wolf is Canis lupus.

But every dog and every dog breed is just another version of a wolf

that, through selection and evolution, has expressed itself.

Every breed shares 99.9% of the same DNA as wolves.

Wolves were extremely successful

up until, really, 50,000 years ago.

Millions and millions and millions of wolves

spread all over Europe, Asia, and North America.

There weren't just wolves. There's what's called a carnivore guild.

- There were giant hyenas... -

- ...giant cave bears... -

- ...lions. -

The modern human population pulses out of Africa,

and we are super predators.

We're so good at hunting

that most other large predators go extinct.

Two species that do survive are brown bears...

- ...and wolves. -

And so wolves are real survivors.

Okay, now it becomes a little bit more mysterious.

Instead of being afraid of humans,

a population of wolves,

they actually became attracted to all the yummy garbage

that the humans were creating.

So a new type of friendliness evolved.

So survival of the friendliest

is really the most successful evolutionary strategy

that has been identified.

And it is counter to survival of the fittest.

It is not at all that being big, bad alpha makes you superior.

And, in fact, if anything, being dominant is super costly.

In any species that evolves,

a new type of friendliness that leads to new forms of cooperation

just absolutely does gangbusters in the game of life.

Whether it's flowers

that are really an evolutionary innovation in the plant world...

"I'm gonna be friendly, give you something,

and then we're gonna cooperate."

And guess what? There's only one terrestrial vertebrate

that can live year-round in Antarctica.

And it is the Emperor Penguin.

They do it by hugging.

They hug all winter.

So friendliness wins. It wins again and again in life.

And dogs have a special adaptation

that helps them take friendliness to the next level.

As an example, one of the things that's changed dramatically in dogs,

relative to wolves,

is they have a muscle that allows them to pull back their eye...

Oh my God!

...and show the white part of your eye, called the sclera.

And we know that when humans interact,

seeing white sclera is the way that our brain automatically recognizes

that you're interacting with another human being.

It's actually one of the key ways

that newborn infants recognize their mother.

Puppy dog eyes.

They really hijack one of the main ways we interact with each other.

And dogs have taken advantage of it.

Puppies are born blind and deaf.

But they can immediately smell their way to Mom.

After three weeks, these puppies are opening their eyes

for the very first time.

This litter has ten pups.

Four above average, but far from the world record of 24.

And every single one is unique.

Right down to the tip of their nose.

So dogs have nose prints in the same way that we have fingerprints.

If you were to put a little bit of ink on your dog's nose

and press it up to a piece of paper,

it would make a unique imprint

that would be different from any other dog.

Each puppy's personality is just as different as their nose print.

And researchers are trying to figure out why.

So it's been a long-standing question in science,

how much does nature matter versus how much does nurture matter?

You can never just have an impact of one or the other.

They both interact to produce the dog's individual personality.

What makes a dog the way that they are

in terms of how they interact with the world?

From the environment side,

that's everything they experience over the course of their life,

even before they're born.

Maternal style, a topic near and dear to my heart.

So that is something that we have been studying

in the first three weeks of the puppy's life.

What we're learning is there is variation

in how much mothers interact with their puppies.

We see a range of mothers that are constantly with their puppies,

and then the more laissez-faire, hands-off mothers.

We see impacts of that affecting the puppies' problem-solving skills

and even their personalities.

What we're learning is that the mothers

that were letting the puppies figure it out on their own,

their puppies went on to become the most successful guide dogs.

A reasonable hypothesis is that, you know,

they're kind of learning to figure it out for themselves early on,

and that's serving them well in their later career.

Understanding how a puppy thinks

is a window into the mind of all dogs.

Hi! How are you?

You ready?

Are we gonna see what you're thinkin'?

Hi, handsome. You're so cute.

I know. I love you.

Right now, we're going to be running the pointing task,

and this is kind of the quintessential canine cognition task

that I feel like kind of put canine cognition on the map

back in the early 2000s.

Puppy, look.

We call it an object choice test.

We use our high-tech Solo cups.

So there's two hiding options.

We actually tape treats into the bottom of each of the cups,

so both options smell like food.

If they're choosing the correct cup,