“Oreo was my best friend growing up,” says . If Hare wanted to hone his baseball pitching skills, his Labrador enthusiastically took on fielding duties. If he decided to explore the nearby woods, Oreo was an ever-willing companion. But there was one place where boy and dog always parted company. “Oreo never set foot in our house. Not one time,” says Hare.
Today, the front door is no longer closed to most dogs in higher-income countries – and many spend their days relaxing on sofas and watching TV. You would think they would be in doggy heaven. But Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, thinks the development has left them in the doghouse. For millennia, he says, we expected dogs to guard our property and protect our family at nighttime. Now, we have a different set of expectations. Not only do we want our indoor dogs to be friendly around strangers and rest quietly through the night, they should also respond to potty training, refrain from chasing other animals and keep their dirty feet off the upholstery. “It’s an evolutionary mismatch,” says Hare.
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The good news is that this problem is solvable. A glut of recent studies indicate that selective breeding and careful training can help dogs adapt to indoor life. Meanwhile, Hare and his team have set up a in their lab to drill down into the behaviours required and shed new light on dogs’ cognitive developmental milestones. Better yet, the researchers have devised techniques that owners can use right now to help train their pets and build better relationships with them.
Despite the challenges that indoor life poses for many canines, we know that dogs can adapt astonishingly well to it because some already have. Service dogs – which are usually Labradors, golden retrievers or crosses of the two breeds – can pull wheelchairs, open doors and operate light switches. They also display extraordinary levels of self-control and are gentle when interacting with children. “In terms of behaviour, they are the dogs that most dog owners want,” says , also at Duke University, who works alongside and is married to . “They’re about a century ahead of other dogs.”
Are service dogs born, not made?
Service dogs have achieved these heights through a decades-long programme of selective breeding for temperament, combined with intensive training. If other breeds are to emulate them, researchers first need to tease apart the relative importance of these two factors. That is one thing Hare and Woods have been trying to do. Since they opened the doors of their puppy kindergarten six years ago, they and their colleagues have put more than 100 puppies through their paces. The dogs, all of which come from service dog breeding programmes, live at the facility between the ages of about 8 and 20 weeks. There, they are lavished with attention and repeatedly tested on a series of game-like tasks. This helps establish what service dog behaviour looks like before intensive training begins, while also showing how it changes in the first weeks of life as their brains develop.
This unique research programme is the subject of a book by Hare and Woods called , which was published earlier this year. One thing they have discovered is that individuals’ behaviour varies markedly. At 8 weeks of age, for instance, puppies can typically understand pointing and similar visual communicative gestures. However, while one puppy named Yolanda aced every test of this ability, her brother, Ying, repeatedly flunked the same tests. By about 10 weeks, meanwhile, a typical service dog puppy begins to develop basic self-control. Again, some puppies, including one called Aries, quickly mastered the skill. Others, such as the unusually energetic Weston, did not.
A potential explanation for this variation came about a year after the puppy kindergarten project began, when at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her colleagues, including Hare, published research exploring the . They collected data from some 1500 dog owners on the behaviour of their pets, which belonged to 36 breeds, including border collies, standard poodles and Siberian huskies.
By comparing this with publicly available information on the genetics of each breed, the researchers discovered that genes aren’t destiny when it comes to dog behaviour. After controlling for differences in training history, genetics explained 45 per cent of the variation in canine self-control, just 16 per cent of the variation in reasoning about the physical world – understanding, for example, that a treat-shaped lump in a cloth indicates that a treat is hidden beneath it – and a mere 0.01 per cent of the variation in short-term memory. “Genetics is important, but its relative importance is different for different behavioural traits,” says Gnanadesikan – and for all the traits in question, heritability is too low to guarantee that the trait will be present in every puppy in a litter.
Breeding a super dog?
That said, the findings also show that some desirable behaviours are heritable to a certain degree, which confirms that selective breeding for temperament is worthwhile. Some dog breeders are already aware of this, but many may not be. Service dogs and other working dogs aside, behaviour certainly doesn’t appear to have been a particular focus of selective breeding efforts in recent centuries. Hare and Woods suspect this reflects the rise of dog shows. The first of these was held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 1859 and . Quickly, dogs began to be judged primarily on their looks, and breeders started to make physical features the focus of their selective breeding efforts. “People shaped dogs to be all of the different forms that we celebrate today,” says Hare. “But I don’t think there was much intentional selection for behaviour.”
For millennia, we expected dogs to guard our property and protect our family
Change is finally in the air, however. In 2020, behavioural biologist founded the , a nonprofit group that is attempting to shift the culture around dog breeding. The aim, she says, is to encourage more breeders to produce companionable pet dogs. To help meet that aim, her organisation has linked up with the , a group of breeders who are now beginning to focus on producing dogs with a temperament to meet the expectations of modern pet owners. “There are, of course, already many people who breed for the pet market,” says , the group’s director. “But our mission is to set a standard of quality for this type of breeding.”
So far, only around 40 breeders across the US have signed up to the project, and Kelly is unaware of similar initiatives in other countries, so we can’t expect the behaviour of our pets to change dramatically any time soon. Besides, as the puppy kindergarten work illustrates, selective breeding cannot guarantee desirable traits – even in service dogs. There is, however, emerging evidence of more immediate ways we can help dogs develop the behaviours we now prize.
Feeding good dog behavior
One potentially promising route is through diet – an approach that builds on recent interest in the idea that the human gut microbiome influences our cognitive performance. A study published earlier this year found that dogs with a good memory . The research is at a very early stage, says team member at Auburn University in Alabama. Nevertheless, if follow-up studies find a causal link between B. pseudolongum and dog memory, it may be possible to develop dietary supplements loaded with these microbes to boost canine memory performance.
What makes this particularly enticing is that a good memory is a highly desirable trait, while also being one that Gnanadesikan’s research suggests is unlikely to be improved through selective breeding. “Memory, especially working memory, is considered a higher cognitive function that’s important in everything that humans and animals do,” says Lazarowski. “It is especially important in training.” And, as the puppy kindergarten project has made clear, dog training is crucial to foster those behaviours we would like our pets to exhibit in our homes.
One habit that is especially important in training is making eye contact. It doesn’t just underpin the extraordinary capacity of dogs to understand our visual communicative gestures, it also strengthens our relationship with them. at Azabu University in Sagamihara, Japan, and his team found that when dog owners make eye contact with their pet, , a hormone that . “The dog’s gaze may be a causal factor in inducing good feelings in the owner,” says Kikusui – and the longer a dog gazes at its owner, the stronger those good feelings become.
One of the most surprising – but potentially important – findings from the puppy kindergarten project is the discovery that a simple training exercise can help dogs develop the habit of prolonged gazing. It involves one of the game-like tasks used by the researchers to assess cognitive development. A puppy is first allowed to retrieve and eat a treat resting in an open plastic container. A second treat is then placed in the container – but this time, the container’s lid is snapped shut to make it virtually impossible for the puppy to access the food. Hare, Woods and their colleagues found that by the age of about 12 weeks, some pups were beginning to learn that they could solve this “impossible task” by appealing to a human for help – and that the most effective way to make that appeal was through eye contact.
Then came the unexpected twist. Playing the game just a few times, with a two-week gap between each repetition, actually seemed to encourage puppies to , compared with an average of 3.1 seconds in service dogs of a similar age that hadn’t played the game repeatedly. “That was an amazing finding and one that I can’t really explain,” says Hare. He now recommends all puppy owners play the impossible task game with their pet for a few minutes every two weeks to strengthen the emotional connection between them.
More generally, Hare and Woods encourage dog owners and their pets to try as many of the task-like games from the puppy kindergarten as possible (see Test your pooch, below). Doing so can help you learn where your dog’s cognitive strengths lie, leading to a greater appreciation of your pet. “Your dog is probably doing all sorts of interesting things that you’re not giving them credit for,” says Hare. Whatever their individual talents, though, if you are trying to train a young dog, don’t forget that, like children, their brains develop as they grow older. So, for example, your puppy is unlikely to respond to pointing before about 8 weeks, will struggle with self-control before 10 weeks and may only realise that it can seek your help at 3 months.
When it comes to dog training, all you really need is love
For anyone worried that this research implies dogs need constant care and attention to adapt to an indoor life, the puppy kindergarten work has one final message: they probably don’t. True, the animals in the programme were given the very best start in life; they had daily exposure to dozens of new people and new experiences – far beyond anything that the average dog owner can provide. However, when the researchers compared the cognitive performance of these pampered pups with that of a cohort of service dogs raised without such a socially rich upbringing, there were few significant differences. “That amazed me,” says Hare.
Recent research backs up this finding. Earlier this year, at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and her colleagues published a study that explored the emergence of human-directed gazing in puppies. Participants were puppies raised in standard homes, so lacking the social whirl experienced in the puppy kindergarten. Yet, when presented with a version of the impossible task game, some made eye contact with humans in an appeal for help at just 6 weeks of age – half the age of those in the lab. “They’re already so tuned in to humans,” says Riemer.
“It’s humbling to discover that when we tried really hard to raise these dogs in a different, super-positive way, it actually had virtually no impact on the emergence of the cognitive abilities that are important for training,” says Hare. “But that’s okay – that’s good to know.” As he and Woods conclude in their book, it neatly demonstrates that all anyone really needs to help a dog feel at home in their home is a caring and sympathetic attitude.
Test your pooch
Researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, have devised a series of games to test the cognitive abilities of dogs. Here's a selection you can play at home to explore the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of your own pet.
While your dog is watching, place two deep bowls behind a solid barrier. Show your pet a small treat, then go behind the barrier and put it into one of the bowls. Remove the barrier and point at the bowl containing the snack. A dog that reliably approaches the correct bowl understands your pointing gesture: it has good communication skills.
Stand a few metres from your dog and, while it watches, place a treat in one of two deep bowls. Distract your dog for 20 seconds with a fun toy, then allow it to approach the bowls. A dog that consistently chooses the bowl containing the treat has good short-term memory.
Place a metre-long, transparent plastic cylinder on the floor and drape a blanket across its centre. Show your dog a treat, then put it inside the cylinder. Allow your dog to retrieve the treat by reaching into an end of the tube. Now, repeat the exercise without the blanket. A dog that runs directly towards the centre of the cylinder – where the now visible treat lies – lacks self-control.
