Good Boy

the threshold to the dog park. Good morning, the dog park. We're out every day today. It's with my producer Ben and of course my two Great Danes, Greta and Daisy. At seven am on a cold, icy winter morning at a park the size of a soccer field, but white with a blanket of snow. If you've ever been to a dog park, then you know the drill, the whole scene, gossiping with people about their dogs. Who's that dog? That's

Stevie Stephen didn't like the ice or snow. People are doing the usual things, standing around, handing out treats, trying to read the minds of dogs. How do you know he doesn't like the ice of the snow? Um his owner just says like he just won't walk on it, like it's been a prop h is Davie, Hi, I know I keep this here? You are you? What are you thinking of? The smartest dog at the park is a little red, brown, foxy looking Retriever named Aila. Aila.

Can I give her a treat every morning? Rain, snow or sleep. My dogs try to steal Isla's tennis ball. Sometimes they succeed, but Ila, she's really restrained. Yeah, I was very smart. Eilah knows she can't take Daisy's ball because Daisy. Daisy would just need assistance with her distress. Eila figured out that there's a reason to be worried about both of my dogs, Daisy because she's so emotionally fragile and Greta because she's so sneaky. She's learning that.

But but but Greta does not know that she should not eat Alla's balls because Greta well maybe Greta knows, but she doesn't care. How do I know what Greta knows? I don't, but I wish I did. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know things and why it's a hard lately to know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour this episode, how to animals know things? And why is it so hard for us to know how much they know? And why it matters that we try?

All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, people have believed that animals have minds and souls. This was a belief once so widely held that it amounted to common knowledge, nearly universal knowledge. Only very recently, around the beginning of the scientific revolution in the West, did animals come to be thought of as essentially machines. Lately, though, that's been changing as the study of animal cognition undergoes a revolution. Meanwhile, the rest of us, just regular people.

We all have our theories about animal minds. Do you think that you understand allah Ah? Sometimes she has fouds brain, and I generally speaking, I think she's she's I went pretty clear about what she wants. What is what leads to fuzz brain? Fuzz? Right, she just sits there and stairs off into the world. He's actually just contemplating very deeply. Yeah,

that might be the case. Eila is a dog that was bred for smarts, So they're like one of the smallest retrieving family and they're meant for like duck hunting, like a truffle hunting. Things like that. She knows how to get things for people, sort of like higher level fetch refer to something in the house, so she like, yeah, she's learned, like stickball, toybox, like a lot of the basics like not whether or not she always listens is mostly in her mood. But it is so tempting to

bring triloquise for dogs. I do it all the time. I talk to them and then I fill in their responses, Like the other day it was raining and I wanted to let Greta out, but Greta was all, I want to go out, but not until it stops raining all or at least that's what I said on her behalf when I was answering my own question, and when I listened back to myself doing this, I think of Doctor Doolittle, the children's book character who can talk to the animals, or more to the point, he can listen to them.

If people ask me, can you speak rhydoceros, I'd say. Rex Harrison played Doctor Doolittle in a musical from nineteen sixty seven. Eddie Murphy's played him Robert Downey Junior, but the first Doctor Doolittle book was published more than a century ago. To try to understand what people know about what animals know, I figured i'd better start with Doctor Doolittle. Sorry, Pups book, We've got to leave the dog park and go somewhere else, far away and long ago, to Flanders

Fields on the Western Front. In nineteen fifteen, in the middle of unutterable devastation, a million soldiers died or were wounded or appeared in Flanders Fields fighting in the Great War, in the trenches in the mock. John McCrae, a Canadian doctor, soldier and poet, he was there. A year later he memorialized all that death in his poem in Flanders Fields.

In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow between the crosses row on row that mark our place, and in the sky the larks still bravely singing fly scarce heard amid the guns below. But it wasn't just a million men who died. Untold numbers of animals died in Flanders Fields, and doctor John McCray loved animals, especially horses. McCray had sailed to Europe in nineteen fourteen in a military convoy with thirty thousand men, had eight thousand horses, including his own horse, Bonfire,

bound for the front. McCray mentioned Bonfire and letters home to his sister. It was as if Bonfire could communicate. McCray wrote, I wish you could meet him. He puts his lips to your face and give us a kind of foolish waffle. McCray marched with nine hundred men and six hundred horses to Flanders Fields. The ensuing slaughter, the suffering, It was unfathomable. The staggering, needless loss of life, the maiming, the killing, and the anguished, tortured suffering of all those horses.

Britain alone lost half a million horses in the war. One horse was killed for every two men. They died in the fighting where they died of starvation. They died of infection and of exhaustion. They fell into minds, they were shot, they died of poison, gas terrified. There is nothing I hated more than that horse scream, McCray wrote home, Bonfire's leg got infected. McCray was there to treat men, but he began mending animals. Somewhere along the way he acquired a dog. He wrote. He ran to me and

pressed his head hard against my leg. He named him Fleabag. He wrote his poem, which went on to become the best known poem of the First World War, and McCray became the war's best known poet. Then, in nineteen eighteen, he contracted pneumonia and meningitis and died before peace came. At his funeral, bonfire followed the casket, carrying in his stirrups McCrae's empty boots. We are the dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dull, saw sunset glow, loved and

were loved, and now we lie in flanders Fields. I can't see that anyone's ever made this claim before, but I'm pretty sure Doctor John McCrae was the inspiration for the character of doctor John Doolittle, a character who was created by another soldier at flanders Field, a brit named Hugh Lofting. Lofting served in the Irish Guards, and he too wrote and spoke about animals just the same way McCray had. Certain horses that were attached to your own company.

You became very fonder. It upset Hugh Lofting that the horses were left to die in flanders Field. There was very little you could do. Nearly all the horses that were injured had to be shot. If we were as far behind and medicine for ourselves as we were apparently for our beasts of burden, we would go around shooting all of our men. Lofting was supposed to be writing letters home from the front to his very little children,

but what could he possibly write about? Everything was horrible, So instead he began drawing pictures and writing his children's stories about animals. Here are some animals playing ring a ring of roses, Peter Piglett, Timothy Turtle, Frederick Fish, Daniel Dog, Miss Catherine Cat, Miss Deborah Duck, Miss Melissent, Mouse, Master Teddy Bear, and Squire Squill. They have all been to

the donkey's birthday party and have been enjoying themselves very much. Meanwhile, at the front, watching those horses suffer in the field, he kept thinking about them, and then it occurred to me that, of course, to treat a horse properly, we would have to have horse language. And then it occurred to me that, of course, to be a good animal doctor required a very much higher order of intelligence than

it did to be a human doctor. In one of Laughting's letters home, he invented a fictional character, a man, the Story of Doctor Doolittle. Once upon a time, many years ago, when our grandfathers were little children, there was a doctor and his name was Duelittle. The name, well, Doolittle, was Lofting's nickname for his son Colin, who was lazy

Dolittle get it. But the character he, I'm pretty sure was inspired by John McCray m d. The first patient doctor Dolittle treats is a horse who's going blind in one eye. The doctor gives him spectacles. I think Bonfire would have liked that. Hugh Lofting was wounded and left the service. He moved with his family to Killingworth, Connecticut, a little farming town, where he kept writing about doctor Doolittle. He lived in a little town called Puddleby on the

marsh All. The folks young and old knew him well by sight. In nineteen twenty Lofting published a book, The Story of Doctor Doolittle, the first in a long series. One day, doctor Dolittle's parrot Polynesia scolds the doctor. He's a medical doctor, not a veterinarian. Remember about how stupid people are? People make me sick. I think they're so wonderful. A vote has been going on now for thousands of years,

hasn't it? And the only thing in an animal language the people have learned to understand is that when a door quakes his tail, he means I'm glad. I happen to have a very good friend who writes children's books and who lives in a little farming town in Connecticut, just like Hugh Lofting. Her name's lis Broach. She's magic with animals. Actually, I believe she is my dog's very

favorite person. Oh oh my god, this is Ben. So I asked Elsa if she'd be willing to join me and Ben on a search for Doctor Doolittle, because Lofting wound up publishing nearly a dozen do Little books in his lifetime. And I wondered if there wasn't some magic about the town of Killingworth that it helped Lofting, an Mit trained civil engineer, hold onto the belief that animals have minds and souls. She's a little trueman. She had a boxer growing up in Oh yeah, oh yeah, he's

a foxy little I've known at least forever. We go on writing retreats with our friend Jane. We walk in the woods with our dogs and talk about the books we're writing. I don't know anybody who's thought more carefully about children's stories involving talking animals than at Lease. My favorite of Elise's books is called Masterpiece. It's about a boy, James, and a beatle named Marvin. There's a chapter book series

two based on the same characters. In one story, they go to the country with Marvin's cousin, Elaine, another Beetle. They go to a town just like Killingworth. Later on, I asked Elise to read a little bit of the story. Elaine and Marvin sit on the rail of the fence in the warm sun, watching the animals. Isn't this nice? Marvin? Elaine asks, don't you think it would be fun to live here? All around them is the country, the big fields, the rushing creek, fences and trees, and wide blue sky.

It's so different from the city. It is quiet, it is green, it is full of animals, not people. In Elisa's books, Marvin and Elaine, the Beatles, can understand everything James the boy says, but James can't understand them. So my point was just that I wanted kids to look at all beetles and think, oh, you know, they may be understanding what I say, and they may have these rich family relationships, and you know they may be afraid

or the way that animals actually are. So I didn't want to have kids think oh, that was just a magic beatle. I wanted them to be able to see the world, you know what I mean. Our first up was the killing Worth Public Library. Elise and I talked to one of the librarians, Tammy Eustace. I asked her if there was anything about the town that made it the kind of place you might want to live if you were in the business of writing stories about animals.

I think it's very much the place. I've read a lot of the history books, history essays, and people are always writing about their farm animals or you know, being even being on social media now everybody is posting pictures of their chickens, and you know, a dog gets lost and the town turns out to try and find the dog or the cat. They've they've grown so much, would

be proud of what's happened here. I'd hope the library might have some of Hugh Lofting stuff or a statue something they didn't, but it turns out that Tammy, who didn't grow up here, is known for her way with animals, and everybody actually called me doctor Doolittle in college. That was my nickname. So small world. We got back in the car and headed for the Killingworth Historical Society. I wondered if maybe they would have Lofting's papers, diaries, photographs, something.

It's housed in a nineteenth century farmhouse. So sweet. Unfortunately they did not have Hugh Lofting's papers, but visire halts these beautiful silly you know. They had Hugh Lofting's top hats. And the curator also showed us a binder full of Lofting memorabilia that he'd collected over the years, including a photo of a historical marker that used to be out

in the front of Lofting's old house. It says Doctor Little's House, built seventeen sixty one, owned in the nineteen twenties by Hugh Lofting, author of the children's book series. It was here that his stories came to life and his animals learned to talk. Lofting's old house. I figured maybe there'd be something there, tucked away in an attic. One more stop on the drive, Lisa and I got

to talking more about animals and children's books. There's a distinction, I think in children's literature between the books that are entirely an animal world, um, you know, like the Beatrix Potter books or um. Trying to think of other examples, you know, honestly, it goes back to like Esop's Fables, right where it's just an animal world that is animated by human emotions or human values or whatever it is. And then there are these other stories that involve human

animal relationships. Animal fables, stories about talking animals go back to antiquity, but the so called Golden Age of children's literature ran from eighteen seventy to nineteen thirty. Beatrix Potter a a Milne, that whole late late Victorian sort of tweet sensibility. All of that, which includes Doctor Doolittle stories, came out of changing ideas about animals, and this itself had to do with what scientists have been doing to

animals and laboratories. So hold onto your top hat while we make a brutal last archive historical detour, a hard turn, not so much historically but emotionally. After the break in the seventeenth century, rants the philosopher Renee Descartes argued that animals have no rational souls and no minds. They can't experience pain. They were basically just machines, Descartes said. Meanwhile, over in England, William Harvey dissected animals living animals without anesthesia.

This is called vivisection. Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, a major discovery. His experiments were brutal and cruel, but if you didn't think animals had souls or felt pain, then maybe those experiments were less cruel. Vivisection became common during the Scientific Revolution. Often it was done on dogs. The experiments took hours, sometimes it was days before the

animals died. A century later, people finally started saying vivisection had to stop, partly because another philosopher came along and said, oh yeah, Descartes, he was just entirely wrong. In the seventeen eighties, Jeremy Bentam insisted about animals, the question is not can they reason nor can they talk? But can they suffer? I mean, obviously they can suffer. Thus was

born the animal welfare movement in England. The first animal welfare legislation was passed by Parliament in eighteen twenty two. In eighteen twenty four, reformers founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Animal welfare advocates especially wanted to outlaw vivisection, which was still taking place. That movement was led by an Irish suffragist named Francis power Cobb. It also, to a degree, enjoyed the support of Charles Darwin.

Darwin loved dogs. He devoted a chunk of the Descent of Man to them. In eighteen seventy one. He wrote, it is curious to speculate on the feelings of a dog who will rest peacefully for hours in a room with his master or any of the family, without the least notice being taken of him, but if left for a short time by himself, barques or howls dismally. What staggered Darwin was that this love extended even to his torturer.

The vivisectionist who nailed a dog to a table, cut him up, left him there all night to suffer, and went back to do more cutting in the morning. As Darwin wrote, everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator. This man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life. Darwin helped draft an anti vivisection bill. He also testified before a parliamentary

commission charged with investigating the practice. A version of that legislation passed in eighteen seventy six, but it continued to be a source of debate. Americans had gotten involved by now, too, founding the American Anti Vivisection Society in eighteen eighty three,

three years before Hugh Lofting was born. By the time of the First World War, when Lofting wrote those letters home from the Western Front, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was working hard to save war horses, had established a fund for sick and wounded horses, had set up horse ambulances, had built horse hospitals. Doctor Doolittle came out of all of this when Lofting began thinking, maybe the best way to treat animals would be to

learn their languages. Talk to the animals their languages. Maybe take an animal degree. I'd study elephant and eagle, buff and eagle, alligator, guinea pig, and flee. Chances are you've never read The Doctor to Little Books. Maybe you've seen that old Rex Harris and Musical though, or the lousy Eddie Murphy movies or the Robber Downey Junior one. Believe me, they're all terrible, But the original stories from the nineteen twenties are full of fantastic elements, like the Pushmi Pullyu,

a lama with a head at both ends. There are many voyages, there are many adventures. The Doctor to Little Books are a little like superhero comics. Still, Dolittle is older than Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Those characters were created in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties. Doolittle was

created in the nineteenteens and nineteen twenties. That means there's all kinds of datedness to the stories, including a lot of truly outrageously racist depictions of African and Indigenous peoples. In spite of the fact that Lofting, a progressive and a pacifist who wrote for the Nation, was an ardent

opponent of racism and of imperialism too. In a nineteen twenty four article in the Nation, for instance, he damned race hatred and urged the writers of children's books to get away from the bigoted misrepresentation of people of different races. Back in Connecticut, Elise and I were just pulling up to the house where Lofting used to live, a yellow farmhouse with a fence out front. The house he lived in on the edge of town was quite small, but his garden was any large, and he had a wide

long and stone seats and weeping willows hanging over. It turns out a doctor lives there now, Caroline, an emergency room doctor. She and her son Ben answered the door and invited us around back for iced tea. We're gonna stay outside. That's fine, both multitude of reasons, of course, that's fine. Not always Lofting he always had three or four dogs around at his house. Caroline and Ben have two, two German Shepherds, rescue dogs. We could hear them inside howling.

They harmonize too, and um, what do you think they're trying to tell us? They just they want to come out, They want to say hi. They're crazy. I mean they won't they won't hurt you, but they're crazy. I know all about those crazy dogs. Sadly they didn't come out to join us. Carolin hadn't known much about too when she bought the house, but the spirit of the place had been hard to resist. We would need a party,

a big neighborhood party. And made little push meeep never mind who was then a little plastic horses and cut them in half, really include them together for glue their heads to play around still at the house. Didn't come with any secret stash of Hugh Lofting's papers, but Carolyn did end up collecting a set of first Editions, each illustrated by Lofting. She said she'd planned to leave them in the house and someday she moves out. We went her on the front to see the homemade painted wooden sign,

a new one that Caroline's kids had updated. My brother made this one. Um so it says Doctor Dolittle House Circus seventeen sixty one, owned by author Hugh Lofting eighteen eighty six to nineteen forty seven. That's his life in nineteen twenties. This is where doctor Dolittle came to life and learned to talk to his animals. The old one said, where his animals learned to talk rated an issue or correction, You just uplogether. I loved that the updating of the

historical record correcting it. The animals didn't learn to talk to us. People learned to listen to the animals, and it's true. Learning animal language was Doctor doolittle superpower, not talking to them. The Doctor Dolittle stories date to the era of animal welfare, when reformers were fighting against cruelty to animals, trying to end vivisection. Today there are different fights.

It's an age of mass extinction and climate catastrophe. There are other questions to ask about humans relationship to animals, including whether sometime soon there will be hardly any of them left. Animal cognition is like any other signiance. It's a means of producing knowledge, but it's also freighted with an almost existential burden, the burden of this moment. If we could understand better what animals know, would we find

better ways of sharing the planet with them. Ben and I have gone to Killingworth, Connecticut with a children's book writer a lease Broach, to search for doctor Doolittle, who could talk to the animals. I came away from that trip, though, wondering what had happened to that idea, to an interest not in teaching animals to talk. But in listening to them, I could talk to the animals. Just imagine it chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee chatting to a cheetah. What.

Right around the time Hugh Lofting was writing the first Doctor Dolittle Stories, the scientific study of animals was changing too. In nineteen oh eight, Margaret Floy Washburn published a book called The Animal Mind. She was a psychologist and her

work involved trying to imagine the minds of animals. For instance, we talk about an angry wasp, or like when we say someone as mad as a hornet, Washburn wrote, anger in our own experience is largely composed of sensations of quickened heartbeat, of altered breathing, of muscular tension, of increased blood pressure in the head and face. The circulation of a wasp is fundamentally different from that of any vertebrate.

The wasp does not breathe through its lungs. It wears its skeleton on the outside, and it has the muscles attached to the inside of the skeleton. What is anger like in the wasps consciousness? We can form no adequate idea of it. Even as she was making that point, a new kind of psychology was on the rise. Behaviorism an attempt to discipline the science of psychology to make it more accountable to experimentation, more of a lab science. But behaviorism also had inside it an old idea, the

idea that non human animals are just machines. Behaviorists experimented. They brought animals into buildings and caged them, and essentially tortured them, not by vivisection, but by experiments so artificial and painful and emotionally tortuous that one critic said that if these experiments had been done on a person, it would be like taking a living man in a coffin, lowering him against his will, into the earth, and attempting

to deduce normal psychology from his conduct. With this device, we can put a mild electric shock on the grid on which the rat starts. You will see that it supplies enough drive to produce a radical change in the behavior of the satiated rat. He hits the bar, the shot goes off, and he's reward. That approach lasted for decades into the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, right around when animal rights activists were challenging all kinds of animal testing.

But I was on the hunt for something new in animal science, something doctor Doolittle had done in fiction and Margaret Floyd Washburn had tried in real life. I was interested in the kind of animal scientists who are studying how animals think and communicate. I think it's this left right here, see what these this break is your destination. It says it's in there. The study of animal cognition

is just exploding right now. So I decided to seek out one of its leading practitioners, a German scientist named Yuliana Breuer, whose new book is called What Dogs Know. To meet her, I had to go to Germany, to a town I'd never been to before. Dogs, of course, are famously good at finding places sniffing things out. I'm terrible at this. So to help me out on my trip to Germany, I took one of my kids. He's studying German. Yeah, it says it on the sign right there,

Max Planck Institute for me. Okay, I figured at least he could read the signs out loud mensch heights human Yeah, human history. You're a stumped. The Max Plank Institute for the Science of Human History sits on top of a hill in the North German city of Yenna. It's a cluster of buildings, sort of Walter Gropia style. Everything's connected by cobbled paths. I think I had in mind that we just follow the sound of barking, but the place was dead silent, so we tried to follow a map

and read the signs using our eyes. A dog. A dog would have just sniffed this place out. Hello, Sorry, we're looking for Yule. The doglet would be like a round corner in this building. Finally we found it, our clue, a dog bowl outside the door. We stepped over the dog bowl and Yuleiana Broyer let us inside to a glass wild office overlooking the city. Broers this very no nonsense sort of person, jeans, pull over, short hair. She

has my dream job. I kept thinking, that's pretty keen to meet her dog, but she was nowhere to be seen or heard my dogs. If someone came to visit, there'd be no talking over their barking. This dog unseen and unheard. Brower is a biologist who's interested in the differences between humans and other animals. Technically, her field is comparative psychology. The idea of comparative psychology has basically to

find similarities and differences between humans and animals. And you can come from the psychological perspective than you are usually more interested into the humans or what's special ah about the human? Why are we different from animals? And we are obviously, or you can also come from a more biological way of thinking just to look at the similarities and to look what cognitive skills do animals have, and and let's say, to find the animals interesting in themselves.

Broyer didn't start out studying dogs. She started out studying chimpanzees in an apouse at the Leipsig Zoo. And of course they share a lot of skills with us, but there are skills and where chimpanzees are really not not good or where where you are surprised that they are not doing well. And one topic there was a huge topic when I started, actually was that chimpanzees do not

use a human pointing gesture. If I want to show you something, the school bus, a cloud in the sky, I'll point at it and you'll look where I'm pointing. That's common knowledge, a universal human cognitive skill, a skill you'd assume chimpanzees have because they're so closely related to us.

But strangely enough, chimpanzees do not do this. One day, about twenty years ago in that zoo and Leipzig Brier and her dissertation advisor, the whole lab, they're all talking about this, and another graduate student says, yeah, but my dog can do that. So they started testing dogs and yeah, with dogs, you point at something, they look where you point, no problem. But then it turned out that really even hendread wolves cannot do it as as good as dogs,

or dogs are special. A laboratory and Hungary at the very same time came up with that same result. I think was that paper. The view on dogs changed a lot because before, I mean my abiology professor would say, our dogs they are somehow artificial, strange creatures, and they are not as intelligent like wolves. The wolves are the real animals, and dogs out something in between, something strange. But then if you changed, because people thought, look, the

dog has a very very special kneed. So the ecological niche of a dog is being with a human, and that's why dogs have evolved very very special skills. Now you might think, if you have a dog, yeah, this isn't very surprising. I know, my dog looks where I point, but you don't know that in any scientific sense for dogs,

we don't have that. We have this what you would call common knowledge, and I assume that most of this is what we can read in and common dog books is correct, but we do not have studies about it. So they started doing those studies. The more you think about that pointing situation, the more you investigate it, the more striking the finding brower. Another dog scientists around the world are writing a kind of codebook decoding the behavior

of dogs. There are a thousand reasons to do this research, but the biggest is dogs are the first animal humans ever domesticated. Why out of all possible animals did humans domesticate dogs first. One theory has it that it's because dogs have such an incredibly sophisticated sense of smell and we have such a worthless one. It's a thing humans needed, but you do not know much about the sense of smells.

It's sometimes really amazing. What's funny to me is doctor Doolittle had this all figured out, at least in his imagination. My favorite scene in all the books is when the doctor is talking with his dog Jip about what it's like to smell like a dog. Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind, and he started muttering to himself. Tar, Spanish onion, kerosene oil,

white raincoats, crust raal leaf, rubber, burning, lace, curtains being walsht. No, no, no, my mistake, lace curtains hanging out to dry, and foxes, hundreds of them, cops. And can you really smell all those different things in this one wind, asked the doctor. Why, of course, said Jim. And those are only a few of the easy smells, A strong one. Any mongrel could

smell those with a cold in his head. Wait now, and I'll tell you some of the hardest scents that are coming on this wind are view of the dainty one. Then Jip closes his eyes and seems to be barely breathing, almost dreaming. Bricks, he whispered, very low, old yellow bricks crumbling with age in a garden wall, the sweet breath of young cows standing in a mountain stream, the lead roof of a dovecoat or perhaps a granary with the

midday sun on it. Black kid gloves lying in a bureau drawer of walnut wood, a dusty road with a horse's drinking trough beneath the sycamore, the little mushrooms bursting with the rotting le. Okay, so that's fiction. Juliana Breyer is a scientist. She got interested in figuring out there's so many sense How do dogs decide what to smell? They imagine being a dog entering a room, and then how can I distinguish all these different orders? How do

I distinguish what is important to me? Breyer came up with an ingenious idea and then began experimenting. I should explain that she uses dogs, any dogs, people's pets, and her experiments. She's got a few hundred of them on call. They volunteer, They come with their owners, their owners stay for the tests. The dogs are not special genius dogs, They're just ordinary dogs. Before she explained the smelling study to me, though, she showed me how the laboratory actually works.

She took us through a hallway and into the dog lab itself. So dark, basement room empty, but in the back of the room, Brier opened a door and let out her dog, a Border Colli mix. What's her name? Nah nah nah Hey Brier took us to another room set up for an experiment. Yeah, so we're in a sort of polygon almost room with file cabins on one long end and three windows. We're in the basement, so there's sort of garden windows French windows, and there are

four boxes spread across the window sills. They are this black boxes, size of maybe a kid's shoe box, and each have a number one, two, three, four. There's a camera stand set up, there's not a camera, and then there's a red chair in the middle of this tiled great floor room. Also on this test, sole knew already that dogs are able to even unskilled dogs, untrained dogs are able to communicate up all the hidden toy and

we wanted to know how it works. Exactly like if your dog loses her tennis ball under the sofa and you ask her to go get her ball, she'll find a way to tell you that that's where her ball is and then it's stuck there. Right. This is called the showing behavior. Briar wanted to test that you can only do this test with dogs who really love toys. Nana loves toys. Briar came back with a yellow ball with a bell in it and she threw it for Nana. So she's crazy about toys. This is what we need.

Then Brier handed me the ball and told me to put it inside one of the numbered shoe boxes on the window sill. Yeah. You show the ball to her and she can watch me, but she can know where it will lose. Okay, okay, I have this ball. She's gone putting it in box number three. Okay, you saw the Broert called back from the next room. Yes. She came back in and sat down on the red chair. She told Nana to sit, and then she asked her where the ball was. Sex see. Nana ran to the

window and jumped up at box number three. Brower got up and walked over to the box. Wallah, the ball was inside that box. What Broyer studying here is exactly which gestures dogs use to communicate with us. Sometimes they jump, Sometimes they go to the box and bark. Sometimes they'll look at the box, then look back at their owner, look at the box, then look back at their owner. One of my dogs does this when she wants to go outside. She doesn't like to bark. She's the smart one.

She'll go to the back door, look at the door, look at me, look at the door, look at me, look at the door until I finally get the message and open the door. That's showing behavior. That's one way dogs communicate with us. But how do they think? How do they think about smells? For one, were smell studies. Brower came into the lab and made scent trails for the dogs to follow. We have a track or a trail, and in the end of the trail is not the

thing that was made by the trail. The dog enters the room smells a favorite toy, say it's a red ball. The dog follows that smell the trail left by the red ball. Sometimes at the end of that trail, the dog will find that red ball. Sometimes, in some trials of the experiment, the dog will find something else, another favorite toy, say a yellow frisbee, that Brower's switched out for the red ball. The important thing was here, that both toys were really important with the dog, so they

locked them equally. Here's what she was trying to find out. When a dog is following a scent trail, sniffing along, is he thinking, oh, something good, something good, something good, or is he thinking, ooh, my red ball, my red ball, my red ball? How would you find that out? What would happened if sniffing the scent of the red ball, that dog following that trail found at the end of

that trail a yellow frisbee. They went there, and then when the toy was exchanged, they took the toy, but then they would just keep on searching for the real one. This would seem to suggest, then that the dog isn't just following the trail thinking good smell, good smell. The dog is following a specific smell, looking for a specific thing, and thinking something like I was following the trail of my red ball, but what the hell, here's my yellow frisbee.

Broyer's experiment proved that dogs have an idea, a way of thinking about what they're smelling. Doctor Doolittle imagined that Broyer proved it. Saying goodbye to Breyer, I remembered something my friend Elisad told me that she'd learned about on a podcast. Dogs can smell time, so they can tell it's morning because of the way the air and the smells in the summer, and they can tell evening because those things change. And that's the dog's way of interacting

with the world. I love that smelling time. That was an idea. I was really interested in the totally unique experience of being a dog in the world. At least dug up that podcast. It was an interview with a scientist named Alexander Horowitz. She'd written a book called Inside of a Dog, What Dogs See, Smell, and No. I figured I should meet this Horowitz and headed to New York. I wanted to get a kind of dog's eye view or I guess a dog's noses scent of the dog park.

You may think this is a lot of globe trotting for a podcast episode about dogs, but have you read the Doctor Doolittle stories. The man is half the time gallivanting across the planet looking for obscure animals like the giant sea snail. One time, he even rides a lunamoth to the moon. I didn't take a lunamoth to the moon, but I did take Amtrak to New York to meet Alexander Horowitz, a Barnard professor and head of the Dog Cognition Lab. She's got a fantastic podcast about dogs called

Off Leash. Her basic research question is what is it like to be a dog. She's interested in how dogs smell. That's how she figured out dogs can smell time. But she started out as a fact checker at The New Yorker. It was really, really fun. Yeah, it was a great exercise in thinking about knowledge and truth. Yeah, what counts us truth? Horowitz came at dog research by way of fact checking for one writer in particular. Yeah. I was

checking for Oliver Sacks, and I thought, oh, cognitive science. Yeah. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, wrote about how people think, what it means to be a human. Hero books like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a hat, about a disorder where you see things as things that are not there. Sachs had this tremendous moral imagination combined with his own scientific mind, and then his extraordinary gifts as a writer. He could picture and then conjure on the page how

an entirely different being experiences the world. He inspired generations of scientists and writers, including Horowitz. So she left The New Yorker and went to graduate school. I was interested in a metacognitive skill called theory of mind, which is an ability that humans develop typically at about age three ish, where we start thinking and realizing others have opinions and knowledge different than we do, which is obviously foremost in

our cognition. There hadn't been any evidence in these experimental approaches with non humans of theory of mind, but it seemed to me something that you would expect to see in a lot of social animals, because sociability requires having some sense of what others. Yeah, one kind of evidence for a theory of mind is play playing, you have to have a theory of mind. Harwood's decided she needed

to watch animals play. So I was looking for playing animals, seeing if I could see anything in their interactions which would tell me about their minds. But animals don't just play on demand typically right often they might want to disappear from view to play. It probably took me about six months before I realized taking her out three times a day to play with other dogs, I should study dogs they're playing. It was a Eureka moment, ah dogs, but she wasn't alone. Suddenly we all found we had

this very good subject. They were good because they're convenience, but they were good because they're also smart. They have a lot of social cognition, meaning they are skilled socially they're able to get information from others. They're very cooperative, not just with other dogs, but inter specifically with humans. And so a few old of dog cognition kind of started blooming in the early two thousands and now actually

is quite prolific. Right, there are hundreds of articles written every year on the field, whereas when I began their word, there were none. Horowitz took hundreds of hours of footage of dogs playing and analyze them second by second, breaking them down into episodes of play. A unit of play she called about like in boxing, about talking about dogs playing is like singing about bicycle riding. We had to go watch it. So I packed up and headed up

to a dog park along the Hudson River. Now they're staring at each other, right, there could be a something, ye, So that's like an exaggerated approach. And there's a playbout under the bench and sort of wandering off. For this dog is wagging, but I don't know if she's going to engage. She hiding under her owner. She's like tentative with the keeping in touch, more touch with the owner. Not maybe the most confident dog. I'm surprised because he did go mount right away. She reminded me of a

sports commentator. Oh look, here's another here's another little belt. So you have a dog on their back. You can really take advantage of that, and the good player will not. We'll just see if he's doing little feigning. But he's not all going all in like he could and waits and then she jumps up. That's a nice little bout. So there's a lot of turn taking there here. Like I do a job, I knew. I was fortified with new information to bring back to the dog Bark with

my dogs Greta and Daisy. I also couldn't help prontriloquising the tall doodles looking for a playmate. I could see longingly over the gate, who's coming in? I only have a dreevers in here. He Real dog science isn't ignoring everything common sense tells you about the reality of animal

consciousness so you can experiment on animals. It's following your own curiosity, your own love of dogs, in this case, out of curiosity just to know, but also for the same reason that Hugh Lofting created Doctor Doolittle while watching horses being slaughtered on Flanders fields. I want to know what it's like to be an animal in order to treat them better. Every road you drive down in the town of Killingworth, Connecticut, you come across another farm, horse farm,

goat farm, sheep farm, goose farm, duck farm. Hugh Lofting, the creator of Doctor Doolittle, loved this place. Near the end of his life, he decided he wanted to be buried here. He died in nineteen forty seven. His body was shipped back to Connecticut. When Ben and I went there with my friend Elise Brooch. We went in search of his grave, trudging across a field, watching out for ticks and poison. Ivy all right, three leaves green and shiny. Right yeah. With the owners of Lofting's old house, we

crossed a field of very tall grass. Man, I feel that this is very last dark right here. Yes, would nearly come to the end of our mad cap adventure, hunting for the evidence of the age old knowledge that animals have minds and souls. Finally we spied the cemetery the back corner. Okay, so it's a granite marker, like a small rectangular almost like a child sized coffin, baby sized coffin, And says Hugh Lofting, eighteen eighty six to nineteen forty seven. Maybe we should look up how to

pronounce the left for you quiz right? I mean I think quo quis? Okay, quick, separate rabbit. I like how you just rolled. They are just want to Caroline, who lives in Lofting's old house, comes by every once in a while and leaves animals here by Lofting's grave plastic animals. Alise helped me out with the Latin quiss separabit. Who

shall separate us? It's the motto of the Irish Guards, the regiment Lofting fought with during the First World War, when so many animals, human and horse and dog alike died needlessly. Who shall separate us? I loved that for Lofting's grave marker. For a very long time, people have believed in a great separation, a wall dividing humans from all other animals. Weirdly, children's literature is one place where that wall gets broken down, and lately it's being broken

down by animal science. The more scientists study animals, the more we know what animals know. What do dogs know? We still don't really know, But the more we do know, the clarer it becomes that less separates us than some people used to think. The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is

Mia Lobel. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research assistant is Mia Hazra. Our full proof players are Least Brooch and Robert Riccatta. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jeannette Junior and the Star Jeannette Foundation. The Last Archive is a production

of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening across us our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, Listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you

get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapour,