Does your dog really love you?

dog doesn't love you? And we decided not to go with that because, uh, it's it's a little anti dog and I didn't want to come up with this dog hating cat person. Well, and the jury is a little bit out on that, right. Yeah, we can't definitively say your dog doesn't love you, because there's some interesting data.

So I just want to point out that if you're Josh Clark, you can apparently definitively say that dogs are man's best friend and quote, even if you're strictly a bona fied cat lover, it's nearly impossible not to be moved by the brand of loyalty unique to dogs. That's from Josh's How to Work's article um is Our Dogs trully Man's Best Friends, which is worth reading but but, but Josh has a bit of a thing and for cats. I think he was licked by them as a child

or something. I think so too, he was afraid they were going to steal his breath. Yeah, but but I admit I I tend to side more with the with the cat uh on the on the cat's side of of the old dogs versus cat's argument. And I'm not trying to stir up a big debate because I think there's a lot of crossover between the affinity we have for our animals and the the the the often ridiculous ideas we get in our head about what they are

and what our relationship with him consists of. Oh, you're talking about anthropomorphosizing, where we project all of our feelings onto cat, dogs, sometimes a robot you name it. Yeah, And there's but the interesting things, there's been a lot of studies and exactly what's going on beyond beyond the whole This dog is my child, this dog is my friend, um, you know that they're There's been some actual studies into what's going on in the brain when we inter act

with dogs. What's what's going on in the dog's brain when it's interacting with us, and uh and and and you know, there's no denying that these are amazing creatures. And in the relationship they have with us is is pretty bizarre. Uh and and and pretty incredible. They've You have you have a a a species that just lives throughout the world, often in luxurious environment. Well sometimes they're

not so luxurious environments. But but you have some dogs that are really living well and and really benefiting from from all the fruits of human culture without actually having to do any work. Yeah, well, let me just spring this little stat on you. According to the Nova documentary Dogs Decoded, there are more pet dogs than babies in the world, nearly half a billion. So yeah, of course they've got their own clothes and furniture, and you know,

they've got their own little dinner plates. And according to um Um The World Without Us author Alan Wiseman, if humans civilization were to stop, tom most of these dogs would just vanish, because it's it's we'll not vanished, you know, like it's not like not like the you know, the Second Coming and the Rapture and all that. But but they would they would die out pretty because pretty steadily in most cases, because they wouldn't be able to support themselves.

They wouldn't be able to feed themselves in the environment

like that depend on Yeah, they depended on us. I mean likewise with the cats, most a lot of the cats would die and others would just become feral because we've created these these artificial environments and we've propped up these these species and allow them to just run wild, you know, around the world, even if running wild is only in your living room, in your backyard, right right, I mean we can't help it because we look at these dogs, we look at puppies, and we instantly feel

a connection. Right. We already know that this is scientifically proven. Yes, we've in fact, we've we've seen the release of oxytocin in the brain when well in two cases. One when we're just interacting with their dogs and we're making a long gaze um eye interaction, which is like we lock eyes. Yeah.

There's a two thousand and nine um Japanese study and they took fifty five dog owners, all right, they brought them in and they had all the dog owners peanut up and then they tested that sounds nice, tested the urine for oxytocin levels, and then they put them in the playroom, let them play with their dogs all right, and then they observed how they're interacting with their pets.

Then the dog owners came back in and they took another yearine sample um which I guess they had to have a drink while they're in there playing with their dogs. I don't think i'd be able to go twice like that. And and and they were able. And they also had a control group where some owners sat in a room with their dog and we're told to completely avoid looking at their animal. So uh so that that they found

that that there was a increase in oxytocin levels. And the people who made long gaze eye contact with their dog, that's where they're looking on average, you know, two and a half minutes of eye contact during play. And uh and and so the people were benefiting from this, from this this relation ship. They're feeling really good about it. It's mutually beneficial to them. And then also we should

talk a little bit about oxytocin. This is that feel good hormone that is released and a lot of people think about it more in the example of an infant and its mother during the breastfeeding process, because that's when oxytocin is released for for both um for both the mom and the baby, and they're both feeling all lovey dovey and content. And oxytocin is great because it's an

incredible stress reducer. And they have actually found that people who are dog owners are less likely to have heart attacks. And if they do have a heart attack and they are a dog owner, they're three to four times more likely to actually survive that heart attack. That's how powerful oxytocin is and a possible reason why we feel such

a bond to our animals, in particular dogs. Now, of course it's worth knowing that if you don't survive that heart attack, dogs are cats will probably eat your feet. But that's that just goes with the territory. Yeah, yeah, a very at least lick them. Yeah, well it starts with licking and then it becomes eating because they can't help themselves. This is the situation where they just then I'll go ferrell and yeah, and then then they go they go ferrell in the living room. Yeah, they run around.

So you know, we know that the oxytocin and and this sort of connection makes us want to cuddle and care for them. And again and Nova's dogs decoded. There was a section um in which they featured psychologists Morton Kringelbach, and he put adults in a make scanner, which is like a supercharged neuroimager, and then he showed them photos of adult faces, infant faces, and puppy faces, nothing else, just like the big face looming in the background or

without dark background. And what he found is that within one seventh of a second, their orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in emotional responses, started to light up. And it showed activation only when people looked at infants and puppies, not other adults. And he called this that the parent instinct. Yeah, or it's I mean, it's basically the cute factor. It's

why people love like cute overload. It's why if you're if you like Peter or somebody, you're gonna put a baby seal on the cover of your your promotional material, or a half naked woman. But but but in many cases Green Piece or various organizations, you'll see that like the white baby seal is the one to put on

because its face looks so much like an infant. You look at cute cartoon characters and you can see like the big eyes and the you know, in the small head and in the various uh um, some measurements that didn map up with a with a baby's face. Yeah.

And you've actually even mentioned this when we've talked about robots and and having robots in the service industry, that they're in Japan, that they've got the really super cute looking robots that actually to us, look, you know us here in the West look kind of creepy because it does look like cartoon character giant robots. Um. But so yeah,

there's there's definitely something to that. Um. So, I mean, there you go that the basis a very good scientific basis for why we feel the way we do about dogs. So Okay, we've got the bond with them, right, Um, and we know from fossil records that we have a really long history with dogs, right this, This didn't just start up in the last hundred years. Yeah, yeah, no, this is like a hundred thousand years ago. We can we know that we started to hang out with them,

But why would we hook up with canine familiars anyway? Well, the most immediate um answer that comes to mind is that we're we're probably in a situation where we were either competing with the wolves for food, or the wolf or the wolves were food or both. And uh, and after you've killed a whole bunch of the adult wolves, you might find all these little baby, cuddly wolves, all right, and you go there and your first instinct, well, you

probably have two competing instincts. One is, hey, let's fry these puppies up because there because because the tribe is hungry, and these look delicious. But then on the other hand, they look kind of like human babies. So it's your belly is full and your bellies full, and they're harmed. They're unlike the adult wolves you just strangled to death on the primeval plane, you know, or you know, are beat to death with a stone. Um. These things aren't

attacking you. There may be licking your hand, and that they look cute. So you've been like, all right, let's take these back to the camp and play with them for a little bit. Yeah, and so this and then this sort of bond could have developed. And then all obviously, wolves we know are the closest relative to dogs, right, so at some point dogs separated from wolves. Um, so it's very likely that we began to see the wharf and having these little pups around that then became really

good hunters along with us. And if you look at dog domestication, which happened around fift years ago, that's about the same time that we quit doing the whole nomadic hunter gatherer thing and switched over to being a grarian's so you know, then we're much more localized and it makes sense to have a dog around that can help

you hunt. That's really fat us inefficient with with their own food consumption and how they use it as fuel, right, so they don't have to eat a whole lot themselves and they can guard right, right, and that in turn makes us much more successful as a species, right and you can and uh, it's also worth noting that there's a show on Discovery and BBC called Human Planet, and it's a great example of this whole um hunting and then raising the young kind of situation with the Owa

Guagi Guaga people of the eastern Amazon, and they hunt and kill monkeys, which they eat and they make them do a delicious looking stewins. Well that's I don't know about eating brains, but they're definitely stewing up some monkeys. But then they'll bring the baby monkeys back to camp and they'll they'll not only raise them as pets, but in some cases they'll actually breastfeed the really young baby monkeys um, which is you know, even more than more

oxy uh toastin released into the system through that. But but it's an interesting it's such an interesting glimpse into how humans work. Just the idea that you could on one hand kill and eat this particular species, but then also raise it up as a pet. And then they in this case, they don't actually eat um eat the monkeys that they raise pets, so there's a difference there. But but then you have situations, I mean, clearly you have people who are really attached to baby goats that

may grow up to be become a food source. So that you see plenty of examples in human culture where where there's even this divide between the baby and the edible adult, it will become right. Yeah, And just to go back to oxytocin again, and I have read this before that it's it's actually pretty addictive um apparently for for new moms, and then it does give you a

big rush. So it's sort of interesting that you know, you see those instances of surrogate um breastfeeding happening like like a wet nurse is could be an oxytocin addict. Really yeah, yeah, I mean you think it is an altruistic doct but you have to wonder, you know, if

they're just doing it for the rush. So maybe you know, this is completely unproven, but but maybe the situation was we domesticated um dogs and are working on monkeys because you have, like you have these these oxytocin addicted nurse maids who are running wild through the woods and give me some puppies. Let me breastfeed some puppies, you know,

because I gotta get that rush. Wow, I'm saying, like this pulp fiction movie like set fift years ago, I'm yeah, thinking about Darryl Hannah now as as a crazy wit nurse. This is not good. Yeah, and we gotta get back. Yeah, that's totally unproven. Do not use that as an answer.

We gotta get back your students. Yeah. But but then another reason that we would hang out with canines and domesticate them is their sense of smell, which again would help with hunting um and in fact, cancers apparently have a smell that dogs can be trained to detect according to a growing body of research. Um and actually they've had some small trials which have shown canines capable of detecting melanoma in a person's skin and lung and breast

cancers by chemical que was in the person's breath. The trick, according to Auburn University veterinarian Larry Myers, is the ability of dogs to smell the multiple layers of chemicals. So it's so much more nuanced and sophisticated rather than the way that we detect smells. They've they've got a lot

more parts to their system, so to speak. So all of this adds up to the fact that we that that dogs have definitely helped us to become successful and our survival and and certainly dogs themselves have become very successful in their survival right. And it's it's interesting to to look at, Okay, just on the surface things. Dogs definitely have emotion, whether whether or not they can there's this thing called love, and they can feel it. That's

that's a different issue. But but definitely emotion is it has evolved as an adaptation and numerous species. Uh. It bonds animals to one another. It catalyzes and regulates a wide variety of social encounters among both friends and competitors,

and it permits animals to protect themselves adaptively. And with the dogs that the curious thing is that dogs have are much more social and say cats because I mean, like my cat doesn't want any part of another cat except to chase them off and uh, and they're just not social for some reason. It may want to live with she man want to live with humans. But the heck with all the cats, dogs however, much more social.

They have a much more social mind and uh. And therefore there's this they have this whole alpha uh situation where one alpha can dominate the others and there's this dominant and passive thing in there. And then the way they behave so we've been able to interject ourselves into their into this this uh, this this system where we can eat where we either become the dominant master of the dogs or we become this thing that the dog is possessive of. Um, which is generally not the ideal situation,

but you see it all the time. Yeah, and that's interesting again to draw those parallels and see how we are more alike than different than dogs in the sense that we are really social creatures, and certainly fifteen years ago we were you know, carnivorous. Um, not all of us are now, but and we really relied on hunting. Yeah. So same thing with dogs, right, Yeah, you had this suddenly this dogs like growing up among people, and there's this this guy and he's like saying, hey, I'm the

pack leader. Let's go catch ourselves some food, and the dogs like, yeah, I'm game for that. That's totally what I've evolved to do. So let's yeah, let's let's make it happen. And by the wather like thirty of you guys, five of us. Yeah, you guys have the clubs, you can be the pack master. Fine, you know so part of it is like you kind of wonder how much

the dogs are going along in their own survival. Yeah, and then you you get into all this uh, this, this these other weird areas who were like you take a dog's natural hunting instinct and then you you you kind of perverted over the over the ages to to create say a hurting animal where you're like saying, hey, you guys are really good at catching these animals, but let's work on you not killing them, but just moving them around, uh, in exactly the place I want them

to be, right, yeah, when you're talking you gent x right, yeah yeah, so yeah, I mean actually eugenics became pretty popular in nineteenth century Europe, right, So there's this drive to perfect and design our environments, including pets, and of course you have this sort of newish technology too, and eugenics, um, so they applied that to dogs through selective breeding. So you're like, in the scenario you were talking about, that's

like a border collie, right, um. And so this allowed us to to basically breed out traits and breeding traits as you said, and and and you know, of course now we have our little tiny um toy poodles and every from that to like a mastiff, right, and you can take everything in between and sort of mush it up and see which you can get. So it is amazing to think that right now, um, of dog breeds are modern breeds that we created. So that's four hundred

genetically distinct dog breeds. This presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. So in many of these cases, we are breeding, selectively breeding animals to encourage particular traits that that allow them to perform a task, and as those tasks disappear, we end up then in breeding them selectively to encourage physical traits that we identify with that

particular breed. Right, so you have like situations like with boxers, where you no longer actually need boxers to perform the task they were bred for, and instead you just breathe them to look even more and more like a cartoon character of themselves in the ring. Yeah, and then there's the there's the whole the longer the ring. Um. I believe they were used to control cattle and like, I

think it's like slaughterhouse situation. Um, so we have robots for that now, So instead you're just like, hey, let's breed them, make them look funny and stand on the side of a football field. Likewise, even with with with the with with sheep herding dog, like my my family has a as a herding dog and they don't have

sheep or anything. So the dog just loves to run around and barket trees and attempt to herd things like tractors or or branches in a tree or hawks flying overhead, and and you just think, wow, we've really screwed this one up. We we we've we've we've taken this animal's natural hunting instinct turned it into something that benefits us and then say all right, we're eliminating that job. But

you guys stick around and uh and just go crazy. Yeah, And that's actually where the problem comes in, right, because I mean, you know, it sounds like in this scenario, at least your dog can go out and hang out in the yard, but some of those types of dogs are you know, confined to apartments and they just go run and running circles and basically then the next thing

you know, they're on zoloft. So um. But what allows us to do this to to breed these traits is that they have such a great plasticity of jeans, and it takes just twenty five years to create some sort of breed that you want, which, if you've get evolutionary terms,

is like supercharged evolution in a sense, right. Um. And there's actually a good example of this is a dog called the dogo Argentino and it has something like, you know, twelve different breeds that they tinkered with over two and a half decades to create the perfect dog that could take down wild boars. Without killing the boars, but could also hang out with kids, you know, and be all cuddly. Wow, that was an interesting checklist when they were putting that

one together. It's like, I needed to be able to take down a boar, but I wanted to hang out with my kid too. Yeah, And in twenty five years and and and and taking everything from like a mastiff too.

I think there was actually, um, maybe a bull terrier in there somewhere in the mix, and just tinkering around with it, and then finally they had something that Again, this was helping them at the time because they really didn't have this wild boar problem that was eating all the crops, and so they wanted to take them down

without killing them. And this was a good solution. But it's also a little bit frightening to that we could do this to such a degree, right, hence the eugenics part, which you know, that's a whole other two sides to

the eugenics coin for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And then of course the other problem with this, or you know, a problem in the sense when it's not used, um perhaps with the best of ethical intentions, is when you have someone who's a disreputable breeder who is continuing to breed so aggressively that there are a lot of defects that the dog might be born with. Right do you end up with in some cases a genetic neurological problems? Um, Like,

for instance, there's the whole feigning goat thing. Um if you're anyone familiar with the feigning goat, these are goats that they just happened to uh through breathing. They have this neurological condition where they'll you'll frighten them and they'll fall over. And for a number of reasons, people decided that the breeders decided, hey, let's keep let's keep this. This is a good trait to having a dog, even though it's it's not really i mean, in a goat,

even though it's not really good trait. And there are some but there are some breeds of dogs that have similar conditions just because they've been they've been they've been this sort of narrow branch on the tree as they've continually bread to encourage various various traits that are part of that breed. Yeah. So, I mean, there's there's a lot going on here that can actually tell us about

ourselves too. Of course, we always as humans figure out how we can get some data off of you know, other scenarios and so if there are certain diseases and dogs, like the boxer genome has been decoded, so that's been really helpful and saying, okay, on this marker we find this disease, let's now flip over to the human genome and see if we can find it there and see what it can tell us about this disease. So that's

actually helpful. Yeah, So okay, so we know this, we know about the genics part, we know why we hooked up with them. But my question is, you know, how well do dogs really know us and how well do we actually know them? Is their data there? You know, our our dogs at good as reading our emotions as we think they are. Well, it's interesting that they can definitely communicate with us that they are a that I

mean not every species can do this. Um. For instance, you have the case of Chaser, the border collie from Spartan Bird, South Carolina that apparently knows A thousand and twenty two perhaps more. Now, who knows this is? I think this article is from like a year ago. A thousand and twenty two nouns um and and it can also identify verbs like like the owner was able to teach it to understand commands like fetch ball, fetch frisbee, fetch it all and and and it was understanding both

the verb and the noun. So that's I mean, that's that's pretty amazing. And she knew categories to right, yes, like you know, she knew like the balls, the toys and so on and so forth, so she could be directed even at a greater level. And then from what I remember to in that article, the owner had worked with her for like five to six hours a day, repeating words sometimes forty times, like a new word forty

times every which is insane. And if you think about this too, um, we as humans learned something like ten new words a day until we reach I believe, the twelfth grade, in which case we then have something like sixty thousand words at our disposal. That here's this border collie getting forty new words a day to our ten words a day. So that is actually a a particularly strange situation. This is, you know, most dogs know something

around the order of a hundred and fifty words. Yeah, but but then again, six like six hours a day with this uh, with this old dude in his apartment. Yeah. You know, it's like if if I was stuck with him and he was coaching me on vocabulary, I'm sure I would learn all these fabulous new words. And I know, I know, I think we all should just go spend a week with them. Um. But the other thing about dogs, and this is something that's been proven out, is that

they really have learned to read our emotions. Uh. And and this is was found again in the Nova Dogs Decoded documentary. Uh. What they said is that when humans spress emotions, they do so asymmetrically. And what that means is if I express anger or joy, if you if you go down the middle of my face and cut it in half and and examine it, you'll see that it's not symmetrical in the way that I expressed those emotions. So one part of my face is gonna be different

than the other. Okay, it's not going to be, of course, like too crazy looking. It's it's pretty nuanced, like like whatever the face is when like if you smile on one side of your face and frown on the other, you're talking like even a normal what we might on the surface think of as a normal smile is still not a completely symmetrical Yeah, what looks cohesive really isn't. Um So, and that's that's again, that's such a nuanced thing.

But what they did is they said, Okay, for humans, when we're looking at the emotions, are reading emotions, we start on the left hand side, and then we got left to right, so we have a left hand bias. So what they did is they want to see if dogs did the same thing. So low and behold. They put them in front of a screen and they watched the dog's reactions. They filmed the dog, and they saw that the dogs did the same thing. They went from left to right, although when dogs look at each other,

they do not read from left to right. And as far as they know, dogs are the only species that can read human emotions in that way and the way that we do. So they know they know that, like this is how you read a human space. You have to look left or right. Yeah, yeah, in order to to pick up on the nuance of okay, well that's the emotion that I think that is being expressed by

my owner right now, which is really pretty interesting. Um So, again, there's this idea that dogs have evolved to read a human space and that that makes dogs understand us in a way that other species don't. And again hence the bomb that we feel with them, that they can actually

feel our emotions. Um. And they also respond to gestural cues like pointing yes though it's it's it's interesting that there was a study UM from the Department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology at the the map Plank Institute for Revolutionary Anthropology in Germany Max Plank. Yeah, they have, they've come out before UM where they looked at a ra tional and rational acts UM. Here like, here's the example

you have in human infants and a mother. Like if the mother is is say, I don't know turning on the coffee maker, we know, well, I guess nothing to pay. Well, we're gonna roll with this analogy, all right. So the baby sees the mom using her hand to turn on the coffee maker, all right, and then that they'll on some mobile connect and say that's that's a good use

of that hand. That's irrational use. But and then they see the mother, well, say, with an armload of clothing, she doesn't have a free hand, but she needs to turn on the coffee maker. So she uses her forehead to do it or knows I don't know. Um, and then the child will be like, all right, we'll give

them this situation. That makes total sense. But if the if the mother were to walk in with nothing in her hands too free hands, and then reached over and turned on the coffee maker where there with her forehead or nose, that the child would not see this as irrational. That's coconuts. Yeah, but the dog, there's no coconuts with with the dog. The dog would just accept either act.

There's no difference between irrational and irrational. Okay, So that's a case in which we might be projecting ourselves onto whether or not a dog can can make those sort of judgments, right, I mean, and another thing is the whole like, oh my dog did something bad and uh and and and now he's sorry or she's she's sorry a little catter, she's so ashamed of herself. But that's just a submissive behavior. They're not really ashamed of anything.

There was an interesting study into that that was actually profiled on the Radio Lab episode Animal Minds, which is a good listen for more of a broader animal emotional uh um thing and uh and but but you had these people that you know, we're claiming all my dog thinks that thinks it did something bad. He knows it did something bad, and that's why it's ashamed. But they found that that that that dogs in a control group would behave the same way even if there had been

no mischief in the living room, um et cetera. Yeah, and that's why animal behavior is so tricky, right, because you've got the whole fact that your dog is so tuned into you that you can't help but think that the dog is with you in lockstep and the way that you're thinking and acting. And in fact, that they called the Clever Hans effect. And Clever Hans was actually a horse in the nineteen hundreds that could use his hoof to count um and answer mathematical questions. And he

was just like the star of the animal world. Right, everybody was astounded by his knowledge. But a psychologist picked up on the fact that the horse answered correctly only when the questioner knew the answer. So what was happening is that the horse would count up until the point in which they observed that the questioner began to relax when when when they had read when clever Hans had

reached the correct number. And again it's that that nuance of being able to read body language and say, okay that the human is fine, Now this must be the right answer and all quit you know, stomping my hoof. So they've they've talked about that with dogs as well. Is that, you know, there's there's that fine line of you know, how much is the dog just trying to read your your um emotions and your your gestures as

opposed to really cogitating. Yeah, there's it's like there's this fiction we create with this with this dog, is this friend or this this this child in our lives? And uh, but the animals participating in this fiction as well. And I find that really fascinating. I mean, it's not I don't think it it downplays the what's amazing about the relationship.

But but it's it's it's kind of like blind men and elephants, or one is touching one part of the elephant and the others touch in the other and they both have certain ideas about what's going on, but neither one is the correct. Uh, neither one is the the the actual image of the elephant. Well, and we we've talked about symbiosis before, right, and parasites, and this reminds me of that this is sort of like the mutually

beneficial parasitic relationship, right right. I mean, your your dog is pretty much like, well, you know, I'm sure that your dog gives you a lot of love or perceived love, but your dog is really kind of you know, just hanging out on your couch, eating your food, watching your TV. Uh, not necessarily contributing to the household income, right right, but but maybe participating to your feeling of of of of of safety in your house, or or elevating your emotions.

So there, I mean there's a different benefit. Maybe it's barking at strangers, or if you're really on the ball, maybe it actually does work around the house overthing you have like seeing eye dogs and helper animals, where there's a definite case to be made for this. This and this symbiotic relationship is really um, you know, working on all cylinders. Yeah, and see, I think that the two are so entangled. That's really hard to look at this and say, you know, is there a definitive love or

you know or not? Right? And what complicates it is the way that we actually react to dogs as well. Uh. Dr Adam mcclowsky, at a research center in Hungary recorded six different scenarios in which a dog was barking. And this isn't parton because dog barks, we often hear and then we think, oh, the dog is feeling this way or that way. And so what he had observed a lot of humans saying, oh, well, my dog does this mewing sound or actually it's like a cat, right, but

this complaining kind of whiney sound. You know, she's she's hungry or so on and so forth. So he wanted to see if he could actually corroborate that. So he had these six different scenarios in which a dog was barking, and a couple examples is as you actually mentioned, is um barking at the door, barking at the gate when

they're a stranger approached, and he recorded that bark. And then another example was when the owner put the dog on a leash and then left the dog and the dog started barking as to say, you know, don't leave

or whatnot. And he took these six different recordings and played them for dog owners, not the dog owners that the dogs are attached to but totally random dog owners, and those dog owners could, almost without fail, each time, say, oh, I can you know I think that that dog is going to be lonely, or that dog wants to play fetch,

but someone is withholding the ball. I mean, they got it really very you know, these specific details right, which amazed him that they could map the emotion to the bark, which begs the question, are we so now like fine tuned with them that we're reading their cues just as much as they're reading ours. It's kind of like it's say, it's kind of like we're both actors in a play and we've both forgotten that it's a play. It's an imperfect metaphor. But no, no, I'm going with it. I'm

going with it. Um. Yeah, you're like Dustin Hoffman, and for weeks after when your roles you continue to to act as though you're autistic. Yeah, that's right. You argue that he never got over the rain Man thing. Now, I know, I think it comes out in spurts sometimes. I mean, it was a fine performance, don't get me wrong, but anyway to to your knowledge, so, I don't know that it gets us to this point where we can't definitively say does your dog actually love you? We know

there's a lot of oxytose in flowing. Yeah, the the the naturally generated drugs in our body kind of complicate things. But yeah, but that can be said pretty much everything that we do. Yeah, And on a personal level, I can say that my my my dog Ted, I certainly loved she was a wonderful dog, and I felt that way to her. And I think as a child even read to her. I loved her so much. Did she pick up anything? Were you able to? No? She was? She was no clever Hans or what was the other

dog's name, chase Er? She was. Yeah. Now there's that. There's that cat that writes mystery novels with its owner. I forget the author's name. Oh my goodness. That is probably the best case of ampomorphization I've ever. I wish I could remember her name. I have not read any of her work, but if I remember correctly, she used to write like kind of saucy literature. Of course, and then suddenly she did she started writing, and then she started writing mystery novels with her cat, and and has

continued ever since. Been a great one of those great literary partnerships. So yeah, there you go. Well, hey, you know, I think I have a little listener mail here. Let's see what we have. Ah. Yes, both of these are related to our Germ Free Dirty Hippies episode which recently went live. Um first we heard from Luke, and Luke writes, Hey, Julian Robert, I just listened to the Germ Free Dirty Hippies episode. You guys touched on the idea that of

not using shampoo. I wanted to let you know that I haven't used Sam shampoo since November seventeen, two thousand seven, and my hair has never been healthier. I used to have lots of dandruff and a very since their scalp. Now my hair looks healthy, doesn't itch, isn't oily, and doesn't smell. It got really oily for the first three weeks or so of not using shampoo, but then it

seemed to balance out. I have so much shorter hair, and it's about two inches long on top, so I'm sure this makes it easier than if I had had really long hair. I know some people who don't use shampoo rents it out every so often with a mix of apple cider, vinegar and water. I'm not sure what this does. Maybe it helps, uh get rid of oil. Anyway, I've never thanked YouTube for the awesome show, so I thought i'd take this opportunity to write in and say

thanks for making me smarter. Well, if you're welcome, that's stuff. That's great. Yeah, and actually we've got a lot of anecdotal evidence about this, I would say, if you can call it evidence. And um, it was actually really hurtening. I was like, wow, people are really it's not just me. Who's who's interested in this shampoo question. Yeah, I've cut down. I'm going like two days at a time without actually shampooing my hair. Her coat looks very shiny, I mean

in a good way. Look, well that I also had bacon this morning. You know, well that'll do. That's a machine they can do. But um oh, and we also have another email. This one is from Thomas, and Thomas writes in about this and uh, this is a rather long email, so I'm just gonna read part of it. He says. Anyway, let's just say that in the past twelve months, I've probably used shampoo maybe six or seven times. Until two weeks ago, I had a use shampoo and

probably six months. Generally speaking, I only use shampoo if I go to the beach or swimming a heavily chlorinated pool, though I do use condition about once a month. Let me just say my hair is a gorgeous That's probably the most narcissistic sentence the twenty year old male can either. But it is random. Women, that's right, plural have stopped me just to say, hey, I've seen you around the office and I just wanted to say, I don't know what you do, but you have gorgeous hair. Well, I

think we both can can relate to that absolutely. Yeah, get it in the break room all the time. Yeah, Jerry had to lock the door to keep the women out the otherwise they'd be in here complimenting us on our hair right now anyway, um Thomas continues, you can't imagine the speed with which a human face can transition to object horror. When I quote how long it's been since I've used shampoo, it's quite a site. The worst part of terminating your relationship with shampoo is the first

two months or so. During that two month period, your scalp seems to freak out and overproduce oils lots of warm showers and scalp massaging, like Julie mentioned, help a great deal, but it's still kind of grows there. You go, that's the secret to healthy hair. Yeah, so you know, if you have any more anecdotes of your own experiences going with the No Pooh method of hair care, UM, let us know. I mean, we can't. That's short for shampoose. Anybody's confused about that. Um, if you have any other

No Pooh situations, let us know about that. We're always game for scatological content. Uh and uh and uh. And if you have anything to add about this dog episode, let us know. I'm sure, I'm I know that a number of you were dog owners and uh and and if you're like me as a cat owner, then you you probably spend a lot of time just trying to figure out this weird situation in which a furry quadruped lives in your home, sleeps on your bed and uh and we act like it's the most normal thing in

the world. It's not. It's pretty weird. And you occasionally dressed up as a pirate. I mean that's yeah, they want to hear about that. Yes, So so let us know. It's it's fascinating and uh uh, and I'm curious to see what everybody's in particular thoughts on it are. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. We're blow the Mind on both of those, and you can drop us a line at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of

other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has a RYE. Download it today on iTunes.