Athena: 00:00:04 Have you been zombified by your dog or really by any adorable pet that might be living with you right now or lived with you in the past? Dave: 00:00:14 Yes. [laughter] Possibly died the morning of this recording. Athena: 00:00:20 Possibly. Dave: 00:00:21 Yes. Athena: 00:00:21 Yes. Well, welcome to the zombified podcast. Zombified is your source for fresh brains. We are a production of Arizona State University and the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. I'm your host, Athena Aktipis, psychology professor at ASU and chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. Yes, that's really a thing. You can look it up on the Internet. I'm joined by my host, Dave Lundberg-Kenrick. Dave: 00:00:47 Hello. I'm Dave Lundberg-Kenrick and I am the media outreach program manager for Arizona State University and a big fan of all things brain related. Athena: 00:00:56 I love brains, too. Dave: 00:00:57 Brains are good. And so are pets as we talked about today. Athena: 00:01:02 Yes, pets are wonderful. And um, we have the amazing pleasure of talking to Clive Wynne today on this episode of Zombified. Dave: 00:01:13 And I think this is a really good episode because there's a lot that, there's a lot of really interesting information that he goes over. Athena: 00:01:21 Yeah, and some of it is really, really heartwarming and then some of it is super dark. I love that. Dave: 00:01:27 Yeah. And it's, it's a nice mix. And so, and also we talk about this sort of idea of like symbiosis, like, you know, the, the non-parasitizing zombie dynamic, which I think is a really interesting one. And so... Athena: 00:01:45 Zombification doesn't always have to be bad. Dave: 00:01:48 Yeah. Well we'll see. That's what we'll discuss today. Athena: 00:01:52 Yeah. Yeah. In fact, um, maybe I can just like talk about, uh, we have, an episode coming up in a few episodes with Mark Flinn and Mark Flinn said something really, really great, I think, about manipulation, um, and love, which is that love is when you enjoy being exploited. Dave: 00:02:14 Interesting. [laughter] Athena: 00:02:14 So I think that like totally ties in with this episode about the puppypocalypse. Dave: 00:02:20 Interesting, so... Athena: 00:02:20 What do you think, is love enjoying being exploited? Dave: 00:02:24 That makes me wonder, well, is it really exploitive? But, I think we could, uh, discuss that on another episode. Athena: 00:02:31 So what do you mean by exploitation. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I guess we should jump right in then with, uh, we're going to talk a little bit, I think to, to start out about our pets, right? Dave: 00:02:41 Yes, yes. Athena: 00:02:42 And how we feel about our pets. Dave: 00:02:45 Exactly. And so, uh, here we go. Athena: 00:02:47 Here we go! INTRO MUSIC: 00:02:49 [Lemi Psychological playing] Athena: 00:03:25 Dave, are you zombified by your dog? Do you have a dog? Dave: 00:03:29 Actually, you know, I was until this morning zombified by a pet hamster and now the hamster died, this morning. Athena: 00:03:36 Aww, I'm so sorry. Dave: 00:03:36 It's actually really sad. Um, it was my daughter's like first real pet that she like she saved up for with her own money and, and we knew like, we knew that it was coming, but this morning, like, on the way to like getting ready, she was like, Dad, can you come out here? And I was like getting ready. And she's like, I think Toffee died. And so, and Toffee did die. So, um, so that was, that was our pet. That's sort of a sad, uh, answer to that question that you may not have expected. [Dave chuckles] Um, that the pet died today.Uh, and so... Athena: 00:04:14 So when you were, when Toffee was still with us, how, how did Toffee zombify you? Dave: 00:04:19 Um, well I think it's probably a smaller extent than a dog, but, uh, but Gretta was really very attached to Toffee. Um, and uh, you know, I mean it's, hamsters are a pretty self contained thing, but we would, we made it little fake houses. Gretta really wanted to, like, she really liked making it little, um, little homes out of, uh, out of popsicle sticks and little outfits. Athena: 00:04:55 Aw, that's so cute. Dave: 00:04:55 Yeah. [laughter] Uh, at one point she wanted to put a diaper on it and I remember we would try to, try to, which it, you know, was clearly not excited about. Um, and so, uh, so it was a good sport. Athena: 00:05:05 It totally sounds like zombifying her like, emerging parental investment mechanisms. Right. She wants to like put a diaper in it, on it and make it a little...Yeah. Dave: 00:05:17 Yes. Oh, um, and then she even had a friend who like would come over and they would like talk to the, the hamster. And then when I would come in the room, they would say, look, it's Grandpa Dave. Like, I was the hamster's grandfather. [laughter] Uh, so yeah, they very much, um, it very much did play into sort of this, like parental thing. So, uh yeah. Athena: 00:05:42 Clive, how about you? Are you, are you zombified by your dog? I know you have a dog because I've been to your house and your dog is so cute. [Clive chuckles] Are you zombified by your dog? Clive: 00:05:50 Well, I'm not sure, it's going to depend a lot on how, where we want to, I mean without wanting to be pedantic, it, it's going to depend lot on how we want to define zombified. I mean, do I act in my understanding of my dog's best interests? Yes, I do. Yes. I do. So in that sense, my dog has taken control of my behavior. So, in that sense we could say yes, I'm zombified. But, I don't believe that I do so at the expense of my own interests. And if, if, if we were to adopt a sort of biological talk, biological terminology and, uh, talk about parasitization, which is, you know, in biology when one species takes control of the behavior of another species. To be parasitized, you ought to be acting outside your own best interest in the interest of the individual that's parasitized you. And there has been some discussion among people who think I'm right about dogs and people living together. And the suggestion does sometimes come up that dogs have parasitized people. But I don't really think that's true because the cases where somebody will act for the benefit of their dog at their own expense. True expense, biological expense, which of course, you know, we first world residents are so wealthy that it would cost us a lot. You'd have to do a hell of a lot for the benefit of your dog to be acting at your own expense. Right? Athena: 00:07:21 So what about people who, you know, have a dog? I'm just going to be a little bit, uh, you know, speculating, maybe a little provocative here. So people who, uh, perhaps are of prime reproductive age who have a dog or maybe two or three, um, and if they didn't have a dog, might be more likely to have a child. You think that, do you think that exists? Clive: 00:07:48 Well, so I mean, in the great world, you know, let's just take this one nation, United States, 330 million people, 80 to 90 million dogs, this place is big enough that there is every, every possibility you can think of is represented out there somewhere. So somewhere, there are people, we're presumably talking here more of women than of men, who have lots of dogs. And if only they got rid of the dogs, they might have a better chance of becoming parents, which is ultimately what our biological best interests reside in. But on the other hand, at the other extreme, there are people who have dogs and precisely because they have dogs, they have, they have a handsome, charming dog. And they go out with this charming dog around let's, some, around some place where there are many other people of reproductive age. And Lo and behold, the presence of their beloved pet actually increases their chances of producing offspring. So... Athena: 00:08:45 Yeah, but there's also this issue though that we don't want to like confound what would be in your evolutionary best interests with what's kind of in your personal best interests, right? 'Cause you could say, well evolutionarily speaking you would be, you know, best off if you had the maximum number of offspring possible, you know, donate all of your eggs and your sperm. Right? I mean that. So that doesn't actually make sense for our personal well-being. [Clive agrees] So, so I mean I could imagine another scenario where maybe having a dog does have a negative impact on your reproductive success, but maybe a positive impact on, you know, your personal well-being, right? Clive: 00:09:25 Right, well there are plenty of claims now, some of them, some of them backed up by halfway decent scientific studies that having a dog improves your health, improves your social health, improves your ability to make friends. So there are plenty of studies out there that, the quality is mixed in those studies, but there does seem to be, on balance, the suggestion that had, that having a dog in your life can be a positive force at many different levels. Alongside, as we were saying, and there don't tend to be so many scientific studies of the negative side of the relationship. Not least because it, there's nobody with a financial interest in funding those studies on the negative side of the relationship. But there was a, I almost had a wonderful story. It's not a wonderful story. It's a tragic story from Texas from about 20 years ago and there was a woman who had a baby and a dog and the dog killed and ate her baby and when the police came to take away and put her dog to sleep, she was quoted in the newspaper, absolutely distraught. She said, I could always have another baby, but there'll only be one Fido. Athena: 00:10:36 What? Dave: 00:10:37 Wow. Clive: 00:10:37 Yeah, but the whole reason that's an interesting story is because it's, it's weird. She has been, she was zombified.[Athena agrees] She is a prima facie case of someone who's been zombified and she's been zombified and she's been parasitized. And frankly I think probably there's something altogether not ripe in her psyche. And the whole reason it's a, it's a colorful, fascinating story is because it's vanishingly rare. I mean, I know there's one story from a newspaper in Houston, Texas or Galveston, I forget the city from 20 or 30 years ago and I'm always on the lookout for another one. But it clearly doesn't happen that often. Athena: 00:11:12 Yeah, right, Thankfully. Clive: 00:11:13 It clearly doesn't happen that often. Athena: 00:11:15 Yeah. Yeah. So, Clive, you study dogs and human interactions with dogs. Do you want to give a little bit of sort of big picture of what topics you're most interested in in that space and maybe how you got interested in them? Clive: 00:11:31 Sure, sure. So I've, I've been interested in animal behavior since as long as I can remember. It took me longer to realize that I was interested in the relationship of people and animals. And for a long time I kind of kept my professional interest in animal behavior and my interest in human animal relationships as somewhat separate sorts of things. And then a little over a decade ago I realized that if I focused on dogs, I could have everything cause anything I might be interested in animal behavior, dogs have it. And then there's no animal with which people have had a longer relationship than the dog. People and dogs have been together for at least 15,000 years, were the first animal to be domesticated by quite a considerable margin. I mean, people always talk about dogs and cats together and there are many interesting things about the human/cat relationship, but cats didn't enter human lives until maybe three or four thousand years ago, which is like 10,000 years later than dogs enter human lives. So dogs, unlike cats, who are really very close to their wild relatives, I mean most cats in a mild climate can survive year round outdoors, can hunt for themselves, whereas most dogs cannot. Most dogs are in what biologists call an obligate symbiosis with people. In other words, without us, they don't survive, which is really interesting. They have, they have pledged themselves to us and without us, few of them would make it, few of them would make it. As I say in the US there are 80 to 90 million dogs. If people disappeared from the United States, almost all of those dogs would die out within a few years. Most of them cannot make it on their own. Athena: 00:13:09 So where did dogs come from? Clive: 00:13:11 So that is a matter of immense controversy right now. And people in different parts of the world are making their claims. There are claims from southern China, claims from Siberia, claims from the Middle East, which always struck me as a pretty plausible place for dogs to have started from. But now there is some, um, dog remains from western Germany, which are older than the ones in the Middle East. So goodness knows. The point is that all of our dogs are descended from wolves and wolves, before we humans messed them up, wolves were very, very widely distributed all throughout the northern hemisphere from the Arctic circle down to the equator. So with the originator species being so widely distributed, uh, dogs potentially could have arisen almost anywhere. Um. Athena: 00:14:06 And how did they evolve from wolves to dogs? Clive: 00:14:09 Well that's also an area of considerable controversy. I am personally pretty thoroughly convinced by the argument that dogs came into being when people settled down, when people became sessile and created that, that symbol of human presence, which is trash. Whenever our species settles in one place for a little while, we produce garbage. And that garbage, okay? By definition, it's material that we see no further interest in, but that doesn't mean to say that it doesn't have lots of calories and protein still in it. And so wherever you go in the world, we don't notice it in the first world because we invest resources in keeping animals out of our trash dumps, right? We have fencing and we have people, right? We have people to take care of that for us. But you don't need to go very far away to find animals all over trash dumps and, uh, in Scandinavia and Alaska, you get wolves going on trash dumps. And doubtless 15 plus thousand years ago, uh, you had wolves going on to trash dumps in those days too. And I think what happened was that just by natural selection, those wolves that specialized in our garbage, they changed, they morphed and they became somewhat smaller and their jaws became weaker and their social structure changed as well. And um, Athena: 00:15:31 How about their reproduction? Did it change their reproduction? Clive: 00:15:34 Oh yeah. So, so wolves form lasting pair bonds more or less lifelong pair bonds and produce, they're seasonal breeders, they breed only once a year and they produce a litter and ma and pa raise the litter together and it's a beautiful, you know, allegorical, nuclear family. And that's what a wolf pack is. It's just a family. You've got the pup, the new pups from this year, you've got last year's pups, probably still hanging with the, with the parents and that, that's how wolves reproduce. Whereas dogs, they threw all of that out the window and dogs are completely promiscuous. And even though you get people who dress up their dogs, their male and female dog and talk about having a doggy wedding that makes no sense to dogs, it makes no sense to dogs. They don't - Athena: 00:16:20 They prefer dog Tinder, is that what you're saying? [laughter] Clive: 00:16:22 Well, I'm afraid so, they just, they just, um, they just do what they want to do with whoever is handy at the time. And uh, the males are reproductively active year round the females, although they're not continuously in heat, they're continuously coming in and out of heat. So wolves, male and female, they're only actually reproductively active for a few months of the year, not like dogs. And um, so dogs can produce many more young in much more rapid succession. But the, um, the majority of those pups do not survive to their first birthday because not only do the fathers contribute nothing more than the minimum that's necessary to qualify as a father, but the mothers also commit only minimal investment to their pups. So they carry them of course, and then they nurse them for eight, nine, ten weeks maybe. And then they kicked him out. And the majority of them die at that stage. They don't, they're not likely to survive much past weaning age. Athena: 00:17:26 So now we get into one of the most interesting questions I think for the podcast, which is: why are puppies so cute? [laughter] Clive: 00:17:36 Well, right. So I was, I was, uh, visiting The Bahamas, which is, which, oh, a great place to visit for many reasons, but it's a particularly nice place to study street dogs to study dogs that don't live inside people's homes because it's a very gentle climate. It's, it's geographically a mild climate and the people have a very positive attitude to free living dogs, which is quite interesting from the human cultural point of view. Um, and it's, and it's not as wealthy as the United States, but it's not a third world environment. It's a, it's a moderate, uh, moderately wealthy environment. And, um, and so I was chatting, there is a scientist, a social scientist at the College of The Bahamas, William Fielding, who has done some studies on people's attitudes to the dogs. And he and I were talking about the street dogs and, and how the parents don't really care, parent dogs don't really care for their pups very long. And um, he was telling me that he thought the secret to a pup's success. So I should back up a moment because what I didn't say was wolf families have to stay together because if you want to hunt live prey, you need to serve an apprenticeship. The animals that wolves survive on, the deer, the elk, whatever, or the bison, they don't want to become wolf dinner. So they don't make it easy for the wolf, which is typically a smaller animal than the, than the prey animal it's trying to eat. They don't make it easy to, to be captured and eaten. So that's why wolf families have to stick together and wolf pups have to learn the skills of their parents. With dogs, that's not true. If you're going to eat trash or you're going to let humans feed you, you don't need any special skills. You don't need - Athena: 00:19:23 So, the wolves, they have no option to survive unless they're sort of part of the family for a long time. Clive: 00:19:29 Exactly. Solitary wolves, even as adults, have a lot of difficulty hunting successfully. You need to be part of a group to be a successful hunter of live prey, but that's not true of dogs. Adult dogs that are not people's pets, adult dogs that are surviving primarily by scavenging, they don't, they don't need, they don't want company when they're trying to eat trash off the trash dump, they'd, you know. Yeah. Uh, in, in The Bahamas, there's a KFC and they were, near the KFC, there were the boxes of discarded remnants of chicken, fried chicken and they were dogs helping themselves to these remnants. Well, they don't need help to do that. On the contrary, they'd like to be left alone because that's how they can maximize what they get from it. Athena: 00:20:12 I have a vision now my dog, like whenever I open the composting under the sink to put my scraps in it, she sticks her nose in there. I guess she must be like, this is where I belong! With my nose in the, in the human trash heap! Clive: 00:20:24 Exactly! Yeah. This is primeval instincts coming through. Yeah, totally. Um, so, uh, so where was I going with this? So, so the dogs don't need to learn as much, but on the other hand, if you're an eight, ten, twelve week old pup, it's still tough even just to thermoregulate, right? I mean, you're still pretty small. You still need some kind of support. And what William Fielding said to me was, it was his sense he hadn't made a study of it, but it was his sense that the secret to success of a, of a weaned pup was if your mother would just drop you off near a human home that isn't already caring for a dog. And I thought, that's interesting because I've often had this, this feeling, so that really young, everybody says, dog pups kittens, puppies. You know, everybody loves kittens and puppies. They're so cute! But um - Athena: 00:21:18 Why? Why are they so cute? [laughter] Clive: 00:21:21 Well right, and yet you see newborns, they're not so cute. The same is true in our own species, it's almost like newborn babies are like, you know, it's just as well their mother loves them. Athena: 00:21:29 I hope your kids won't hear this. [laughter] Dave: 00:21:33 But the point is they get cuter. Right? That's what you’re saying. Clive: 00:21:35 Right. They get cute, they get cuter. Dave: 00:21:36 They're not born at their optimal cuteness. Clive: 00:21:38 Right, they’re not born with maximum cuteness. This was my hunch, but nobody had ever had ever looked at this. Although biologists for a long time going back to Conrad Lawrence, um, Conrad Lawrence had this idea, kindchenschema, which is like baby features that the young of any species, we humans find the young of any and all species attractive. And the young of any and all species tend to have certain features in common: larger eyes relative to the size of the rest of the face, smaller mouths, smaller nose. And people have done studies, you know, photoshopping and, and yeah, it's true. We find big eyes and small noses and small mouths, we find them cute. That's cuteness. So, um, so I wondered, could it be the case? Wouldn't it be intriguing to see how people perceive the cuteness of dog pups. And I had a wonderful student before I came to ASU, uh, who had, Nadine Chasini who had good friends who bred several different breeds of dog. And she was able to get photographs of the faces of these dogs from birth up to something like six months of age in fairly dense sets of photos. And we showed people these photos and just ask them, how attractive do you find the different photos? And sure enough, the cuteness peaks at around eight, nine weeks of age, just at that age where human assistance could have the biggest impact in a free living dog's survival. That's precisely when people's reaction is at its strongest. So I mean, my little study, our little study looking at what people find attractive doesn't enable us to, um, pick why this is the case. But it's certainly consistent with the idea that dog pups', uh, peak attractiveness comes just when our input into their lives could have the biggest impact. Dave: 00:23:23 So to, to speculate on that. It's that, that the dogs have evolved to evoke these mechanisms? I guess. I guess maybe you don't know or I don't know, but just, I'm just curious. Do you, do you think it's that they've evolved to become cute at that age or do you think we've evolved to find them cute cause we have an advantage. Clive: 00:23:48 Well there are several different, several different lines of possible causation here. One thing we haven't done as a formal experiment, which will be very interesting to do is to see, well what about wolves? 'Cause wolf pups are cute too. I mean tiger kits are cute too. It would be very interesting to have more than just the dogs to have some range of domesticated animals. You know, domesticated cats, I'm not sure how many other domesticated animals we could go for, but we could have a few. Dave: 00:24:20 Farm animals, I suppose? Clive: 00:24:21 Well maybe farm animals. Um, and some set of wild animals. Now, with the wolves. So my students have on occasion been involved in hand rearing wolf pups. Uh, and they certainly found the wolf pups extremely engaging and cute, but then around weaning age to a much greater degree. So when a, when a, when a canid, a dog or a wolf or whatever is nursing, their snout has to be fairly small or they can't suckle, they can't get on the teat if they have a good long snout. At weaning, the snout tends to then grow and in wolves who have typically a longer snout than dog pups than dogs. The snout at weaning age grows almost like Pinocchio's nose. I mean, it really bursts out. And the students that I had who were hand rearing wolf pups, they said that they found this strangely disconcerting [laughter] that wolf pups snouts started to really grow. Um, so it'd be very interesting to look at this in, in uh, in wild as well as domesticated animals. Now my guess would be that Lawrence was right and that we humans have evolved certain senses of what's attractive in order to care for our own young. That would seem to make sense. I can't see much reason why it would have evolved for us to care for the young of other species. Athena: 00:25:53 Yeah. That seems like it's, you know, vulnerability then that could be hijacked across species. Clive: 00:25:59 Well, right. Athena: 00:25:59 Right? If you really like the big eyes. But, but I guess there's also the question of does being a cute puppy make you more likely to be taken care of by your dog mom? Right. Like the, the actual parent... Clive: 00:26:20 So the interesting thing is from the point of view of the biological mother, the dam, right. We're allowed to say dam, because there's no 'n' on the end. Athena: 00:26:21 You're also allowed to swear on this podcast as long as it's, yeah, yeah. Clive: 00:26:30 Oh we are? [laughter] Dave: 00:26:30 We should have started with this. Athena: 00:26:30 Not gratuitous swearing, but you're, but certainly you can say dam in this sense. Dave: 00:26:36 Well, this doesn't have, this doesn't have an 'n' on the end. [Athena agrees] Dave: 00:26:39 Do you want to just explain what you mean by that? Just in case anybody is unfamiliar with the term 'dam'? Clive: 00:26:44 Well right, so the mother, the mother dog is called a dam. That's, that's the, that's what, that's what this is all about. Um, and so the mother dog, the dam, presumably at that age, eight to ten weeks when we humans are saying, "oh, this puppy is so cute. I just want to pick it up. I want to care for it." Presumably the mother dog, if we could ask her, would be saying, "this is the ugliest thing I've ever seen". Presumably at that age, when it's younger, birth, one week, two weeks, when it really doesn't strike a human observer as very attractive, presumably the mother dog would say, oh no, but this is the loveliest thing I've ever seen because that's when she's willing to invest effort in caring for it. Uh, which is not trivial if you're a free living dog mother to care for pups is very, very high risk. You cannot easily forage your, your, you know, there is no partner. There's no father dog bringing you lunch or anything, right? You're just, you're just starving. The mother dog is just starving while she's nursing the pup. Athena: 00:27:50 Presumably the puppies also are under selective pressure to try, quote unquote, try as hard as they can to be cute to the mom for as long as possible. So there might really be conflict over that. Right? Like the puppy is trying to be super cute to mom and mom is just getting more and more annoyed. Yeah. Right. It's like weaning conflict, it is weaning conflict in dogs. [Clive agrees] Clive: 00:28:09 It's absolutely, it's weaning conflict in a very open way. And I mean by the time you reach eight, nine weeks, the mother is, you know, keeping up, moving away, physically moving away, even nipping at the pups to get them to just leave her alone, which they don't want to do. I mean, nursing is a lot easier than foraging for real. Um, and so where were we going with this now? [laughter] Athena: 00:28:34 Yeah. So puppies and why they're cute, right. So, uh, I think what you kind of, you, you've gotten there, right? That it's the reason is that, or maybe not the reason, but one possibility is that there actually, they look the way they do, they're appealing the way they are, they have the big eyes, they make us want to pick them up because they evolved to. Clive: 00:28:56 It works, it works in their favor. I, as I say, not having actually done this with wolf pups, I don't know that this was part of the evolution of dogs as such. It could just be that it's part of, it would be true of any and every mammal species and that we are equally sensitive to all of them. It's just that dogs are living so close to us because historically, prehistorically they're living on our trash, so they're never very far away. But they have also, I mean, this isn't the only adaptation that they have that makes them so successful in human society. They also, we've found, have, have, um, have genes for what I call hypersociability, which is to say that they are genetically very, very ready to form friendships. They're always looking to form relationships, which is sorta, everybody sort of knows this, right? I mean, when you have, when you have a dog in your home and you have strangers come to the door after an initial anxiety, the dog is very, very quick to make friends with people who come to the door. I mean certainly my dog, it's almost embarrassing if we have anything around the house that needs fixing, such that a return visit is necessary. If the electrician or the plumber needs to come back, then the dog is instantly in love with this person on the second visit. [laughter] And I know my dog is a little bit out on an extreme, but we've done studies on this and dogs are much more ready to form social relationships with people, people and other species that they barely know than, certainly than wild animals, but even than our own species. Right. I mean you don't expect your children to go quite so crazy over the electrician just because he had to come back a second time. Athena: 00:30:43 [laughter] Hopefully not. Clive: 00:30:44 Right? Yeah, exactly. And in our own species there is a, um, a very rare genetic syndrome called Williams Syndrome, which leads to this pattern of very, very exaggerated sociability. And um, and, and when you see a, there's a, there's a video on youtube of some children with this syndrome. And I don't want to say that they remind me of dogs cause that sounds insulting. But there a, this, this sociability, this friendliness, this lack of - Athena: 00:31:13 Loving puppy energy, maybe? Clive: 00:31:15 Well right. There we go. That's a positive way of voicing it. Um, that, that is really striking and, and it is an abnormality in, in, in our species it's an abnormality. Whereas in dogs you take it for granted. You take it for granted that your dog will be so engaged, invests so much in, in expressing friendship, love towards what are basically strangers. Athena: 00:31:37 Yeah. Yeah. I came home from work yesterday and I've got, you know, a husband, I've got three kids, I've got a dog and I, you know, come in the door and I say "hi everybody!" And everyone's like, "oh hi, hey, hey", and just sit where they are. The dog is sitting on the couch but jumps up, wagging the tail, comes over to greet me. Clive: 00:31:58 Oh my God. I mean, doesn't it, it doesn't feel, certainly with my dog, it feels like if somebody prevented the dog from greeting me, you know, if the dog was like on the wrong side of a door, then the dog would cry. Like in pain. [Athena agrees] [laughter] This desperate desire and, and, um, and, and it wouldn't be that different if it's just the plumber coming back for a second visit, you know? [laughter] I mean, the, the, the, the intensity of social connection that dogs have is really, really striking. Athena: 00:32:25 So for your dog, you're really special. Just like everybody else. [Clive agrees] Right? [laughter] Clive: 00:32:30 Yes, yes. Well, actually, I mean, this is not, this is not based on science, but, but, um, I mean our, our dogs have very, very great willingness to very rapidly form social bonds. And there's a study from Hungary where they, they visited dogs in an animal shelter 10 minutes a day for, I think three days, or maybe it was five days. So very, very little social contact with these dogs. And then they put the dogs into the, what's called the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure, which is a test which was developed by developmental psychologists more than 50 years ago to measure the connection that an infant has to the primary caregiver, usually traditionally the mother. And um, and it just involves having the kid and the mother in a room and then having the mother leave the room and videotape how distressed the kid is to be left alone and then have a stranger come in. Very simple things like this, the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure. And, uh, they did this with these dogs that they had only spent 30 minutes with spread out over several days. And they found that the dogs were showing secure attachment towards people that they barely knew. Athena: 00:33:38 Wow. Clive: 00:33:38 So dogs are forming bonds with people very, very rapidly, very rapidly. Athena: 00:33:45 That's really interesting. So in a way they're, you know, perhaps kind of juicing our systems also at the same time, right. If we feel like, oh, this dog loves us and needs us so much, um, so... Clive: 00:33:59 So I think, I think that there, I think that, I mean, I don't want to, I want to be careful not to ascribe evil intentions to the dogs because I actually believe that the dogs, uh, love for people. Is sincere. Right? I mean we could say that diluted, but I don't think [laughter] I think they're sincere. Athena: 00:34:22 So, so dogs really do love us? Clive: 00:34:23 Yes, I think so. I think so. It's so far as, it's so far as there's any way that one could know then I think so. But uh, but yeah Athena: 00:34:33 But how, how do we know? Clive: 00:34:35 Well with things like the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure or, uh, or measures of, um, the love hormone, oxytocin, which is elevated in, you know, parents interacting with their children or lovers interacting with each other. Well it's interacted in dogs and people when, when they interact with each other. So, yeah. Athena: 00:34:53 So dogs actually have an oxytocin system that works similar to humans? Clive: 00:34:56 Yeah! Athena: 00:34:56 That's cool. Clive: 00:34:58 If you spray oxytocin up a dog's nose, it will look at its human more. [Athena expresses amazement] And the human's oxytocin levels go up. Dave: 00:35:06 When the dog is looking at the human? Clive: 00:35:08 Yeah. When the dog, who's had oxytocin sprayed up their nose, looks at their human. The human's oxytocin levels go up. Athena: 00:35:13 So you've got this oxytocin loop? Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Clive: 00:35:17 Yeah. So I think it's sincere on, if that makes sense, if it makes sense to apply that term on the dog's part. But the net result is that we feel obliged to reciprocate and to, and to care for them. Athena: 00:35:31 Yeah. So one of the systems maybe that dogs are kind of tapping into is this oxytocin system, this, you know, love hormone, cuddle hormone, whatever you want to call it. Dave: 00:35:43 So, so why would that be? Like, how, like why does their affection, like what does that evoke in humans that's so compelling? You know, why, why do we, why does our oxytocin go up when, when our dog runs to meet us at the door? Athena: 00:36:04 Hmm. You mean like is it that it like, so evolutionarily speaking you could say, well, maybe it's a, a byproduct, right? So maybe you know, because we have these mechanisms for pair bonding and parental investment and sociality that the systems are just there and dogs are like tapping into them? Dave: 00:36:23 Right. Yeah. This is like, is it like we're designed to like crave attention and since humans don't maybe are not as social as dogs in general, maybe we don't get it and then when we see, oh look like, you know, we come home from work and we're like, "Oh! Somebody's really excited." Or do we have a specific, response to dogs specifically? Athena: 00:36:41 Do we have an adaptation for interacting with dogs? Dave: 00:36:44 Because they provide benefits, you know, I how long has it, how can I actually have a backup. Clive: 00:36:50 Sure. Yeah. Dave: 00:36:51 How, you said it's about 15 thousand? Clive: 00:36:54 Yeah, so I, there are arguments, anything from 15,000 to 35,000. I tend to side with what I consider the more conservative figure, the 15,000. I have no expertise that's useful in this. I just-yeah, the archaeologists that I talked to. Dave: 00:37:13 I was just curious how many, so how many generations of people, that's like 15 or that's, just trying to think of how - Clive: 00:37:20 Generations of people or dogs? Dave: 00:37:22 That was what I was gonna ask cause it's more generations of dogs, right? Clive: 00:37:25 Oh many more. Dave: 00:37:25 So, so they would be more likely to have had more time to adapt to us? [Athena and Clive agree] Athena: 00:37:30 I mean I would just speculate that if anything, you know, humans would be selected to maybe be more cautious or resistant unless dogs are providing evolutionary benefits for humans too. Right. Clive: 00:37:44 I think they did. So I think there was a period, I think that dogs originated on trash dumps, but I think that the, I don't believe that 15,000 years ago when they were written any on trash dumps, I doubt that we actually had a strong relationship with them at that point. We do not have strong relationships with animals on trash dumps. We actually have a special word for animals that scavenge on our trash: vermin. And that implies that they are distant from us, not close to us at all. I think that then as the ice age came, I say, I think these are the ideas of Angela Perry. Not my own ideas, but I believe them. Um, as the ice age came to an end 12, 10, 8 thousand years ago and the climate warmed up, our ancestors were confronted with a problem. It seems like a nice thing right? The ice age sounds unattractive and end of ice age sounds attractive. But actually our ancestors were very effective at hunting in the relatively open environments of the Ice Age, the steppe and the, the, the um, coniferous forest with very little understory. As the climate warmed, you get more forests and you get thicker forests. You get deciduous forests, you get tropical rain forests. It's very, very difficult to hunt in a, in a thick forest, in a forest with a dense understory because we're primarily visual and you cannot see through a dense forest and we cannot run effectively through a dense forest. So, um, so our ancestors were confronted by a problem and they needed a solution. And the solution turned out to be this animal, which had, I think probably quite unnoticed by our ancestors, evolved all on its own by natural selection on our trash dumps. And that's the dog. And I think that, uh, people probably just totally by accident discovered that if these animals came with you when you went hunting, they could be enormously helpful. And um, and dogs are tremendously powerful hunters tools. Even today, I went with an anthropologist, Jeremy Costa to Nicaragua or a few years ago and we went hunting with the Managua people and two of the guys in the village have rifles, which is a 20th century technology that costs real money to acquire. And Jeremy Costa, he's a, he's a quantitative scientist. He, every day he went round the whole village with a clipboard and he asked everybody, did you go hunting? Who did you go hunting with? Did you take any dogs? Did you take a rifle? And by doing a regression analysis on the hunting success of the village over an extended period of time, he was able to identify that the average dog, which is just some scruffy little mutt, really quite small, the average dog is as effective a hunter's aid in those conditions as a rifle, which is an amazing thing, right? A 10,000 year old, naturally occurring technology is as effective as 20th century technology. So uh, so that I think is probably, that's my best guess, and this will reveal itself quite soon because there's more and more, um, archaeology being done on old dog remains and, um, genetic archaeology being done, which will make it make this more concrete. Um, so I think that it's, it's helping hunters that first brought dogs off the trash dump and into the village and into the home and made dogs valuable to people. And, um, and then after that, dogs have acquired all sorts of different roles in different human societies at different times. Uh, still still helping hunters, but many other things besides. Dave: 00:41:25 Like what, such as? Like, I have some ideas, but - Clive: 00:41:28 Other, other roles. Dave: 00:41:29 Like I, I assume like protector? Right? Clive: 00:41:32 Well, right. So, so guardian. That's all. That's all. You know, there are ancient texts, uh, Homer's Odyssey. The farmer has, um, the pig herder has dogs guarding his pigs who almost kill Odysseus on on first contact. Um, Odysseus himself had his dog, Argos, who was a hunter's companion. Um, that's all I can think of off the top of Dave: 00:41:53 Shepherds also, I guess. Also, we use dogs to- Clive: 00:41:56 Well, herding dogs come much, much later. Dave: 00:41:58 Oh, okay. Athena: 00:41:58 Did people use dogs for watching their kids? I remember hearing something about that once. Clive: 00:42:01 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There's all that stuff about, uh, in Hawaii, the, um, the native people would assign a dog when a baby was born, they would assign a puppy to that baby and that puppy would be responsible for cleaning and guarding that baby. And there are more modern anthropological accounts too. Yeah. Athena: 00:42:21 So, do you think, um, what's a better babysitter for a toddler: a puppy or an iPad? [laughter] In your opinion. Clive: 00:42:31 Um, I, I, I'm reluctant to endorse either possibility. Probably an adult human being should be somewhere in the mix. [laughter] Athena: 00:42:41 But if there is no, no adult, I mean, if you had to choose. Clive: 00:42:45 I think that the puppy would probably do a better job than the iPad alone. Yeah. Athena: 00:42:50 Okay. [laughter] All right. Good, good, good. Clive: 00:42:51 But don't quote me as saying that. [laughter] Um, yeah. Athena: 00:42:56 So, uh, oh, you know, dogs have potentially all of these roles that they can play, including babysitter. It seems like a lot of the role they play in our, in our modern lives is this emotional companion. Right? And so, and people develop these really, really deep bonds. And sometimes, you know, like sadly, like what happened to Toffee, your dog will die. And it's really, really difficult. I am lucky enough to not have had a dog die because I, this is my first dog I have now. She's two, so hopefully I won't have to go through that for a while, but I know that's really traumatic. So what do you think it's, uh, uh, something people should consider? So, you know, if you love your dog so much and then they die, can you or should you clone them and bring them back to life? What do you think? Clive: 00:43:51 Well, I, that used to be a very easy question for me to answer in that, and that is to say: no. That there's, it used to be very easy. Well, it's still not that difficult for me to say no, there's no real purpose in cloning your dog. But the really interesting thing is that I, that I've actually visited a guy who cloned his dog. A guy here in Phoenix who cloned his dog. And um, and I was, I was, well let me, let me tell this. The part of the story that's easy for me to tell, which is still quite striking. So cloned dogs are genetically identical to the animal from whom the genetic material was taken to create them. And furthermore, since dogs, uh, exist in litters, it's very unlikely that the outfit that will clone your dog for you in Texas would give you one pup. You would almost certainly get at least two, perhaps more than two. So Barbara Streisand had her dog cloned and I think she ended up with four or maybe five. And those animals are not just genetically identical to the animal from whom the genetic material was taken, but they're genetically identical to each other. And the guy that I visited, he ended up with two and the parent animal's still alive. He had the clones made because the parent animal was 16 and he didn't think she could live much longer. She's now 18 and she's still going. Athena: 00:45:13 Wow. Clive: 00:45:13 And I visited with him and it's, it's not entirely surprising that the cloned offspring behave differently than an 18 year old. Two year olds are going to behave differently from 18 year olds. Athena: 00:45:24 Sure. Dave: 00:45:24 But what's really- Athena: 00:45:26 Usually. Clive: 00:45:26 You would, you would sort of hope. If we're talking about dogs. Right? [laughter] Athena: 00:45:28 But if we're talking about humans, I mean, you kind of get a little convergence of similar behavior, right? Clive: 00:45:34 That true, but what's really remarkable is that the, the, the clones from the same litter who are, who are genetically identical, who are the exact same age, who were carried by the same surrogate mother, grew up in the same environment, have very different personalities. And Barbara Streisand wrote about this, about her four or five clones and she, she not being a scientist, she put it much more poetically than a scientist would have done. She can see, she said, "you can clone the body, but you can't clone the soul," which is such a lovely way of putting it. And uh, so I was really intrigued to visit this guy with his cloned dogs and his two, a total chalk and cheese. I didn't do any formal testing on them. Maybe I should go back and do this. But it was immediately obvious that one of the clones was highly extrovert and was, it was continuously interacting with the people, the guy, and, and us, his visitors, and the other dog was much more passive, much more introvert, quite quickly settled back down after greeting us and went to sleep. So, um, Athena: 00:46:41 So just like human monozygotic twins can be very different in their personalities. Clive: 00:46:46 Even more than I was expecting, more than I was expecting. And what, what that tells you is that if you love your dog for his or her personality, cloning is not going to get you what you're wanting because the new animal, and actually there's an epi- there's an episode of, I think it's This American Life, which is well worth listening to about a guy, a family. They cloned their favorite bull because he had such a wonderful personality. They really loved him. You haven't heard this already? Athena: 00:47:19 No. Clive: 00:47:19 I'm, I'm reluctant to tell you the end because it's - Athena: 00:47:23 Oh, come on and tell us. [laughter] Clive: 00:47:24 The bull, the cloned offspring ends up now I. Now I don't quite remember also. Does it actually kill the guy or does it just horribly main him? But it has a horrible, horrible outcome. Athena: 00:47:38 What!? Oh no. Clive: 00:47:38 And so and so. Yeah. I mean, this is kind of interesting that this is the, these are interesting studies that, you know, genetics is, is everything we are is built from our genes and yet environment can take that even what are superficially the same environments, right? This other bull grew up in the same, the same farm and these pups, dog pups are growing up in the same families. Nonetheless, you can, you can have radically, radically different personalities come out of that. Where were we going with that? [laughter] Athena: 00:48:08 Well, uh, I, I just wanted to know whether you thought it was, whether you can, whether you should try it. And clearly the answer's no, right? Clive: 00:48:15 Yeah. Well, except that, except that the reason that it's right. The reason why I've pulled back a tiny bit pulled back a tiny bit is because the guy that I visited with his two clone dogs, he had so much pleasure in them. He had so much pleasure in them. And are there better ways of spending $50,000? Of course there are. But in the world of people who might spend $50,000 on something who might get themselves a nice Mercedes or a yacht. Yeah. The cloning is, yeah. Okay. Interesting. And certainly for what I learned by being able to visit him, I found it was well worth it. [laughter] Dave: 00:48:55 Interesting. Athena: 00:48:56 So, uh, we have to ask, because this is kind of our tradition right at the end of every Zombified podcast, what, what is your version of the apocalypse of being zombified by dogs or puppies? So, so if you imagine dogs or maybe puppies is even easier let's, let's think about, so puppies, they're so freaking cute. Um, maybe, you know, they evolve to be even cuter, um, and hijack our brains even better. Like, what is the extreme version here of us being zombified by puppies that are so freaking cute that like we can't, we can't do anything else? Like what, what does that look like? What is the, what is the puppy apocalypse? Clive: 00:49:47 Well, it looks like, it looks like, okay, what does it look like, well it looks like the woman I described from Texas whose dog ate her child, ate her baby, and she was, I don't want to say she was cool with that because presumably she did experience some disappointment that her baby was dead, but her disappointment was apparently nothing compared to her disappointment at the thought that the police were going to euthanize her dog. That person had been zombified. That's what being zombified by puppies would look like. That we were all like that. Athena: 00:50:15 That is . . . really dark. Clive: 00:50:15 That when we, when we, when we come home and the, uh, well, you know, in the last, uh, housing crunch and there were these stories about people just abandoning their properties, just tearing up the deeds and walking away. And there were news reports of um, of realtors finding the people have left the family dog behind in the house. If we were really zombified by dogs, the stories would be that they would, they would leave with the dog and you would find their children left alone. That would be, that would be what zombification would really mean. Athena: 00:50:51 This is really scary, cause you know, what I was, what I was thinking. I thought it would at least start with like, they're so cute that we're just laying in bed and cuddling with them and at least maybe there's a period where we, we're all feeling really good because it's just so much puppy love, and then maybe it gets dark later? Clive: 00:51:09 But we do, but we do, right? Athena: 00:51:09 Yeah? Clive: 00:51:09 I mean we already do that. [laughter] And the thing is, to some degree, and I'm cool with that. It doesn't matter. So long as you have enough resources to go around, enough time to love your children as well as cuddling your dog, then it's not zombification. It's just luxury. That's just luxury, right? It only, it only becomes interesting if you, if you consider who do you push out of the boat when it starts to sink and you're trying to get buoyancy, right? You could, do you kick- That's when it becomes interesting. That's when it becomes potential, that's when the potential for zombification would show itself. While we're all just lazing around all day anyway and we've got all the time in the world to hug our children and cuddle our pets and feed our dogs steak as well as our children and whatever, well then, what, what does it matter? You're just, you're just experiencing luxury. Right? Dave: 00:52:06 One thing I hadn't really thought about before listening today, cause I've often thought like, I remember when I would live in New York and I would see like homeless people who would have dogs, right? [Clive agrees] And I think how can they afford the dogs? But I guess dogs, people have dogs when they have almost nothing, right? Like um, even societaly we had dogs sort of before we had much. So I guess those are somewhat scalable in terms of how much get like, cause I've seen, I know people who like you were saying spend $50,000 but then I guess also, I mean they do require some space, but they, they, they maybe don't require as much as we think. Athena: 00:52:44 Well they can eat just garbage. [Dave agrees] Right? So they, I mean maybe you want to feed them steak if you're super attached to them and knit them sweaters and such things. Clive: 00:52:54 I cook special meals for my dog. Athena: 00:52:56 Yeah. But if they needed to then they could survive on probably just your leftovers. I mean. Clive: 00:53:02 Oh yeah. Athena: 00:53:03 Right? Clive: 00:53:03 So, with homeless people, it's interesting because there's a case that might be zombification because these people have very few resources and yet they're sharing them with a dog. Are they going hungry themselves in order to feed their dogs? But the flip side is, and I don't know of any studies on this, but, but I've heard people suggest it seems plausible that a street person with a dog, will, will beg more successfully than a street person without a dog. That's, that's a suggestion. Dave: 00:53:32 I was also thinking that it's, I mean, it's still- a dog can provide protection, a dog can provide affiliation, which- Clive: 00:53:41 And they're warm, warm. Dave: 00:53:44 And warmth, um, and then, and I, I've also heard that, you know, loneliness is a big issue of being homeless. So I could see how the benefits of a dog could really outweigh the costs even, uh, for someone who seems to have very little. Athena: 00:53:57 Well, and, and today, I mean, loneliness and social isolation are a huge problem across the socioeconomic spectrum, right? From people who are homeless to people who are so wealthy that they don't have to have interactions with anybody. Right? So to the extent that dogs can fill that niche. Uh, they’re, I mean, that might be part of why there are a lot of positive health effects associated with having dogs. Right. You, you're the expert on this. Clive: 00:54:30 Well, I'm, I'm, I'm a little ambivalent about some of the claims for health effects, but I think, I think that, um, I think that dogs can and do alleviate loneliness. I think that's, I think that's quite plausible. Athena: 00:54:44 Yeah. So, hopefully we don't really have to worry much about the puppy-pocalypse in the sense that we were, the very dark version of it. Um, but if we wanted to make sure to prevent the puppy-pocalypse or minimize the sort of, you know, potential negative effects of puppy cuteness on our own goals, like are there any recommendations that you would make for people? Dave: 00:55:11 Actually, I have another- before we go with that. I feel like right now it doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like that puppies are negatively zombifying us, but as we've talked to you about it, it's sort of like we've talked a little bit about how we've zombified them. Right. Um, and... Athena: 00:55:30 Right, like selective breeding too, right? I mean there's definitely some, zombification there. Dave: 00:55:35 Yeah. And, and the way they're just, they're so excited and I think it sounds like they're sort of wired to be happy to, to bond and things, but I could see more downsides for the dog's side of things, you know? Um, because I've always heard these sorts of stories of like abusive pet owners and things like that. Um, and so I was just thinking, we may also want to talk about, and we could cut this section out, but I'm just thinking like, it may be worth talking about because you're leading into the sort of tips, right? The tips for how to, yeah. Um. Athena: 00:56:16 So, so the, the question of do we zombify dogs? So do we, do we do that and is it to their disadvantage and how can we take better care of them? Dave: 00:56:28 Yeah. I, cause I think what we, what we want to lead towards is our sort of finale. Like, so, so going back to the, the interview yesterday when we were talking, um, about like computers, sort of, and like- Athena: 00:56:45 Manipulating us? Dave: 00:56:47 Manipulating people. We want it to end with like a positive note of how people could take this information and make their lives better. I feel like this, this whole interview has been positive, which we kind of expected, you know? Athena: 00:57:00 Yeah. 'Cause we, we needed that. We need to, I mean we're talking about zombification. It's dark, but yeah. Dave: 00:57:06 But I think we could still just sort of get to some sort of thing of how can we make our relationship with dogs better? Which doesn't necessarily have to say, how do we survive? Athena: 00:57:18 Yeah. Well, so then I guess one way to think about it, was maybe Zombification is not always bad. Right. And some, sometimes mutual manipulation can be a really good thing, especially if it's the kind of mutual manipulation where it's like, "Hey, I'm making eye contact with you and smiling at you and that's, you know, juicing your oxytocin system and then you smile back at me and then that juices my oxytocin system and we have this positive feedback loop and we're both feeling great." Right. That's, I would say at least subjectively, that feels like positive manipulation that feels like, you know, even if I am being zombified by this awesome, you know, loving social interaction with my dog. Um, that feels like a good thing. Would you, what do you think is that a good thing? Clive: 00:58:05 Yeah! No, I, I, I, um, as I say, I mean there are isolated negative incidents, but so the woman in Texas or the couple to three dozen people a year who are killed by dogs in the United States and several thousand do hurt in some way or another. But I think from the human side of the equation, I think we do really well out of this. I think the companionship, the love, uh, I, and I think we do really well. The costs for, certainly for us first world people are well within a range that we can absorb almost all the time. Um, the situation is somewhat different in much poorer parts of the world where people are kept awake all night by dogs barking. And you know, there's still tens of thousands of people in India every year who die of rabies and dogs are a major vector for rabies. Um, so rabies as is a Zombie. Rabies is a Zombie. Athena: 00:59:05 Yeah. Next season we'll have you back. [laughter] Clive: 00:59:10 Um, now from, for the dog, I mean we are definitely the more powerful partners in this relationship. And so our impact on dogs is much more substantial than theirs on us. I mean, after all, you know, we sterilize our dogs and we determine what they can eat and where they can go and who they can interact with. I mean, we haven't- Athena: 00:59:29 Well and we've selectively bred them as well, right? Clive: 00:59:32 Well, we've selectively bred them. So, so we've had massive impacts on them, you know, every, every aspect of them. And yet they've also done very well out of it. I mean, there are 80, 90 million of them, whereas how many of their wild ancestors are left in the United States? I think it's a few tens of thousands. I don't think it's more than that. I don't think there's more than a hundred thousand wolves in the whole world, although I'm not, I haven't got the numbers at my fingertips. But you compare domesticated animals to their wild ancestors and in the vast majority of cases, the domesticated animal exists in much larger numbers. So on balance, I think these, it's a win win situation I think. I think, oh, for all that there are great problems and they do worry me. And especially, you know, it saddens me how, how in very wealthy nations, we still treat many dogs very poorly. And I concern myself, particularly with dogs that end up in animal shelters of whom there are every year about 4 million in the United States. Dogs ending up in shelters, and some shelters are fantastic. Um, but others are not. And that's, that concerns me. I think we could do better, think we could do better. But, overall I think it does everybody good. Athena: 01:00:52 Yeah. And so if it sounds like you're saying it's mostly a mutualism. Clive: 01:00:56 Yes! Athena: 01:00:56 Instead of a sort of parasitic kind of situation. Clive: 01:00:57 Yeah, I think so. I think it's a, a mutualism. Yeah. Athena: 01:01:01 Yeah. So then how do we, you know, assuming it is, uh, really largely a mutualism, so we're benefiting dogs and they're benefiting us and we're all benefiting and getting our oxytocin systems juiced and everything's great. Um, are there some tips for avoiding pitfalls of, you know, that could disrupt that mutualism that could make one party take advantage of the other or not take as good care of the other? Or are there things that you recommend? Clive: 01:01:31 I, well so I, I mentioned shelters and I would like to see communities do better by the dogs that end up homeless. And I think, I think, I mean the fact that we have so many wonderful shelters, we know how to do it. We just need to be willing to invest the resources to do it. And also our legal structures are astonishingly weak. It's quite surprising, uh, how you're allowed to keep dogs and how you're allowed to treat them. I would like to see that improved. And I would like to see in that when people do have problems with their dogs, I'm shocked that there's no... that the, that the, that the business of helping people and their dogs when they have problems is so little professionalized. There's no recognized accredited systems. Um, and there are still plenty of people, some of them very, very popular who advocate methods of trying to control behavioral problems in dogs that are quite violent and aggressive and usually only lead in the longer term to worsening the situations. So those are those, that's something I would like to see turned around. Athena: 01:02:35 Are there good resources for people looking for, you know, good recommendations for training and how to train their dogs in ways that will make them also feel good about the relationship? Clive: 01:02:47 Well, it's surprisingly difficult. I recommend the approaches taken by Victoria Stilwell who's had a television program and has some books and has a, an academy where they train people and certify people. Victoria Stilwell Academy, the Karen Pryor Academy is also very good. Um, but uh, I've been kind of surprised that they are not all that many people who have taken the accredited classes from those outfits. Athena: 01:03:14 Is it mostly a matter of sort of using positive reinforcement and not negative reinforcement? Clive: 01:03:19 So if somebody is recommending a shock collar or a prong collar, um, or the non, the nonsensical way people taught, some trainers talk about dominance, which is quite, I mean, quite unrelated to the scientific notion of dominance in animal behavior. So you get people talking about how you shouldn't let your dog eat until you've eaten, or you shouldn't let your dog walk through a doorway until you've walked through the doorway. That's all complete nonsense and not at all helpful. Athena: 01:03:47 So if you're using positive, or if you're using negative reinforcement, does that interfere with the attachment mechanisms? Do we know what's going on with that? Clive: 01:03:56 Well it's never, it hasn't been studied very much because it would be an unpleasant thing to try and study. But yes, it would be interfering with the bond that is developing with the animal and leads to more and more submissive behaviors, which are not helpful. Athena: 01:04:13 Yeah. So if we want to have that mutually positive oxytocin juiced relationship with our dog, we have to use positive reinforcement. Clive: 01:04:24 Absolutely. Absolutely. Athena: 01:04:25 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Dave: 01:04:26 So essentially we should just allow them, if, if they're parasitizing our parental instincts, maybe we should just allow it to happen? Clive: 01:04:35 Well, and I think, and I think, I think that, that most people's parental inclinations are nurturing and positive. And, and if you feel that towards your dog, don't be embarrassed about it. Don't resist it. Those are appropriate ways of interacting with your dog in a positive and nurturing kind of way. Athena: 01:04:52 So let yourself be zombified by your dog, basically. Clive: 01:04:57 There you go. [laughter] Athena: 01:04:57 Well, Clive, thank you so much for being here with us today. Clive: 01:05:01 My pleasure. Athena: 01:05:02 And, uh I think we will have to have you back to talk about rabies through next season. Yeah. Thank you. [laughter] Dave: 01:05:21 Alright, thanks! OUTRO MUSIC: 01:05:21 [Psychological by Lemi] Athena: 01:06:27 That's it for this week's episode of Zombified. Thank you to the Department of Psychology at ASU and to Arizona State University in general for supporting this podcast. Thank you also to my lab, the Cooperation and Conflict Lab for all of your support and great ideas for this podcast and to the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance as well. As is my tradition after the credits, I offer some final thoughts, sometimes wild speculations, sometimes a little story. Um, sometimes I talk a little bit about work that I've done, or my colleagues have done that's relevant. Well this week I don't have any research to talk about or, um, wild speculations to offer. But, um, I do have a little story, which is that I've wanted to have a dog ever since I was a little kid. Like I really, really wanted a dog, but my dad was not so into dogs and so I had a guinea pig instead of a dog. But as an adult I wanted to get a dog, but I never actually took the plunge until, Clive gave a talk in my lab where he talked about human and dog interactions. And in the talk he showed this picture of an Egyptian, ancient Egyptian painting where there's a human and the human has a dog on a little leash in one hand. And in the other hand he's carrying stick with a hand at the end. And he said the, it's not really known like what this stick with the hand in the, on the end is or was. Um, but I just thought that was so odd. And so, then, the next day I kid you not, I come home and there is a random bike in front of my house and on this bike where you might like, keep a water bottle, there is a stick with like, a plastic hand on the end. And so, I decided it was time to get a dog. So, we got a dog and it's been amazing for me and for my kids and so we all lived happily ever after. Thanks to that stick thing with the hand on the end. If anybody knows what that is, definitely tweet to me at Athena Aktipis because apparently according to Clive, at least when he was attending or presenting at my lab meeting, this is a mystery for all humankind. Thank you for listening to Zombified, your source for fresh brains. OUTRO MUSIC: 01:09:49 [Psychological by Lemi].