Scrap everything you think you know about your four-legged friend, because science says old dogs can learn new tricks.
At least so says Brian Hare, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke and author of Puppy Kindergarten. He’s also featured on the recently released Netflix documentary, Inside the Mind of a Dog.
“Dogs can learn throughout their lives,” says Hare. “They do have cognitive decline, which means that once they reach about the age of 10…they have a harder time remembering things. They have a hard time inhibiting. But it's only once they've reached the age of 10. And they can still learn new things.”
Hare and I had an outstanding discussion that provided listeners with many revelatory insights into their pets.
“The relationship that we have with dogs is very special,” Hare told me. “It goes back over 15,000 years. And our two species have evolved to live together and socially bond with each other, work together, live and play together. So it really is a pretty unique relationship.”
Listeners texted in questions, and we got rapid-fire answers in real time from one of the world’s foremost dog experts. It was, in a sense, a deep dive into the inner psyche of a dog.
We addressed a recent local news story where three pit bulls mauled an 81-year-old woman to death while she was putting her garbage out. One of those questions we all seem to ponder after hearing stories like this is whether certain dog breeds are more dangerous than others due to nature rather than nurture.
Hare explained that it’s complicated, but aggression isn’t breed-specific. “If you raise a (larger dog that might be really intimidating) rottweiler, a pit bull, a German Shepherd in a positive way, you socialize that dog. It's met a lot of people when it was young and been in different places and met different dogs and had a lot of really good experiences. There's absolutely no difference in how breeds respond aggressively that you can say, oh, this breed is having a problem with aggression and this one's not.”
Rather, Hare says, it’s about how you raise it. “There is certainly an interaction where if you raise a dog in a way that it's not growing up with that positive experience, you're gonna raise the possibility that a dog will respond to others aggressively. And so my guess is that the dogs in this event were raised in such a way that they probably were not experiencing what you would hope pet dogs were experiencing if we wanted them to be good citizens.”
Related
