Ruff translation

We love our pets. And think we understand them. Are we fooling ourselves? Guests: ⁠Alexandra Horowitz⁠, dog cognition researcher at Barnard College; ⁠Holly Molinaro⁠, animal welfare scientist; ⁠Jared Martin⁠, filmmaker and dog owner For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  A couple of months ago, I came across this study called "Barking Up the Wrong Tree," which, great title, but it was all about dog emotions and whether we can actually understand them. So I started trying to shape it into an Unexplainable episode. But then, our friends over at Explain It To Me, Vox's listener Colin Show, they asked me to guest host an episode for them. And wouldn't you know, they wanted to do something about dogs.

• 1:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  So today on Unexplainable, we got a little collab. Like the two halves of the photo in The Parent Trap were coming together.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Sisters. Hallie, we're like twins.

• 1:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Today on Unexplainable, Explain It To Me.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  We just project our emotions onto animals. And that has always just like sat wrong for me.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  I believe that I can read my dog's mind.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  And I think we have to try to take the dog's point of view.

• 2:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  A couple of weeks ago, I went to my friend's backyard to see him play a show.

• 2:17Speaker 05

  So from here on out, it's only songs about dogs.

• 2:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  A literal dog show.

• 2:22Speaker 05

  Well, a good dog on the ground's worth three in the saddle. No matter where you're from. Been many good dogs, friend knew him. But Sam was the greatest one. He was a pound of pound.

• 2:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'm Noam Hassenfeld, by the way, sitting in for JQ this week. And I'm not exactly a dog guy. I mean, I'm not a hater. I love petting a fuzzy puppy in a sunny spot as much as the next guy. But these people at this show, these were dog people.

• 2:53Speaker 05

  Well, a three-legged dog walks into a saloon and he says, "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."

• 3:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then there was me, dogless, watching a band called The Beagles run through their greatest hits.

• 3:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Everyone seemed like they were having a great time. The people seemed happy, the dogs seemed happy. But as I was sitting there, I started wondering, am I sure? Like, I barely know what other people are feeling. How could I be sure about a dog? So I was excited when I found out a listener was wondering the same thing.

• 3:36Speaker 06

  The things that we perceive through our human lens to be sad or happy or whatever it might be, is that actually what's happening in the dog's brain?

• 3:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  This question came from Jared Martin, who's a filmmaker living in LA.

• 3:52Speaker 06

  But probably more important than that is my little child here. My, my child, dog child here, Enzo.

• 3:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Enzo, tell me about Enzo.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  So Enzo is two and a half. He'll be three in early September. I've had him since he was about eight weeks old. He's a... He's trying to get out of my lap right now. Um, he's a, he's a mix, a total mutt. And yeah, I got him. I recently, I'd lived with a roommate for like over 10 years. Moved out on my own and I was like, thought it'd be great. And then I got really lonely and I was like, well, I kind of, I kind of want to get a dog. And we found each other. It was just kind of like the stars aligned and the rest is history.

• 4:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  How, how well do you think you guys communicate?

• 4:37Speaker 06

  There seems to be something like a special connection that we have, I, I feel. That's different than other interactions I've had with dogs, but also like dogs that I've had, you know, in my, in my life. I don't know. It's like, sometimes I can just like, look at him or I'll kind of give him a look. You know, like you might give a, a small child and they, they know what you're thinking.

• 4:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 06

  Cause he does have these little like talkative moments where he, he doesn't bark. He doesn't growl. It's like a, he's like mouthing actual words. And I, I sent a video of that and we can.

• 5:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, that, that was a crazy video.

• 5:12Speaker 06

  Enzo.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  No. Enzo wanted to play with a specific toy. And I told him, no. Not right now.

• 5:24Speaker 06

  Not right now.

• 5:26Speaker 06

  And it felt like a, like a moody teenager in a way, like, like talking back. Uh, that's how I took it.

• 5:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  You're, you're saying that like he understands you. Do you feel like you understand him? Like you can look at him and know what he's feeling?

• 5:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's, there's definitely times where that, that happens too. And, and he has sort of different ways of, I guess you could say, talking to me, depending on what he wants. He'll make different sounds for different things. Like I know the sound he, like when he's hungry, he sort of behaves differently. And he'll make a different sound versus like if he wants to go to the dog park. And I, I just said his trigger word, but if he wants to go to the dog park, it's a, it's a very specific sound. He's getting my attention in a specific way versus like when he's hungry. Like it's just a certain, I guess, like energy level that I'm picking up on. I, I don't know.

• 6:25Speaker 06

  I, I tend to do that just with other humans too, in terms of like, I, I sense people's, it sounds very cliche. I, I'm, I'm an empath, right? Like I can, I can pick up on people's energy and I feel like I can do the same with him.

• 6:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Lots of our listeners feel like Jared. They know their dogs. They get their dogs.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Hi, my name is Chelsea and I really feel like I can communicate with my dog. Her name is Sweet Pea. She is a Chihuahua and she taught herself how to say yes to things. So we adopted our dog Rico a couple of years ago. He was a Puerto Rican street dog. And from the moment I met him, I knew that he was going to be my soul dog.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  I've had my dog fixated since I was 19 years old. I adopted her when I was in college. She is like my entire life. I call her the love of my life and my husband gets super annoyed, but it's true. There you have it. I believe that I can read my dog's mind. Maybe I'm projecting, but I don't care. I believe it's true.

• 7:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  But at a certain level, even Jared isn't sure.

• 7:39Speaker 06

  I definitely feel these things and I just don't. Yeah, there's sort of a disconnect there too of like, am I actually understanding this the way I think I am?

• 7:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can we ask Enzo a question?

• 7:51Speaker 06

  Yes, Enzo.

• 7:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Ask Enzo if he thinks you understand him.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  Enzo, do you understand me?

• 7:59Speaker 06

  Do you understand me? Yeah? No? He's like, where's the reward?

• 8:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  This week on Explain It To Me, we're going to ask the question Enzo refuses to answer. Do we actually know what our dogs are feeling?

• 8:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Or are we just fooling ourselves?

• 8:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.

• 8:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room. You gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.

• 8:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  I get in here to the kitchen and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 9:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp. They've got great bass. And I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this like truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know if I want to head outside for a minute. It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system.

• 9:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 10:04Speaker 05

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• 10:48Speaker 05

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• 11:19Speaker 05

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• 11:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Lots of people are obsessed with animals and it makes sense why. On the one hand, they're like aliens. And on the other, there's this feeling that they're just like us. You can see this in movies like Air Bud or Babe or Babe, Pig in the City.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  My human tied me in a bag and throwed me in the water.

• 12:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, it's fun to suspend our disbelief a little and watch a dog play basketball. But even serious documentaries do this, like March of the Penguins. They're not that different from us, really.

• 12:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  They pout. They bellow.

• 12:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  They strut. You get the sense that so many people who are looking at animals are just searching for the little humans inside the outer shell. But there are some people who don't spend their time trying to find the little humans inside. They're obsessed with how alien animals are.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  I grew up watching Animal Planet, I started when I was like three years old. And I thought what makes animals so cool is they're not human.

• 12:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Holly Molinaro is a researcher and a dog lover who just finished up her PhD at Arizona State.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  I have this vivid memory of first grade, watching an ant crawl across the window.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  And my teacher yelled at me because I wasn't paying attention. But I was just fascinated with like, what could this ant be thinking? There's no way it's just like thinking human thoughts walking along the window.

• 13:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Holly had the same question our listener Jared did. The same question I did. Can we ever understand what animals are feeling?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  I know from my own personal experience, like we just project our emotions onto animals. We think we know that what they're feeling. And that has always just like sat wrong for me like throughout my whole life. Even though it's so fun to do like my cat sitting in my lap now, like, oh my gosh, she's obviously loving me so much right now. But in terms of taking care of them, those like biases can get in the way.

• 13:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  She did find some research that made it seem like even trying to understand other humans could be hard. There were these researchers that photoshopped the face of someone with one expression onto different kinds of body postures. So postures that were disgusted or sad or afraid or angry. But when people looked at these images, even though the face was the same, people thought the emotions were different. They cared more about the context of the picture than the actual face.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  And so I was like, what if we just did this with dogs? What if I changed things around the dog and asked people the same question? What do you think the dog is feeling?

• 14:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  So Holly designed a study.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  This study is called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Human perception of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors.

• 14:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  She started with Zoom.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  It was like, you know, 2021, so pandemic time still. And just like Zoom blurs out the background. I was like, well, I feel like I could figure out how to do that.

• 14:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, like blur out everything except the dog?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  Interesting.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Took a crash course in video editing on YouTube, you know? And figured out that you can like take away the background with software editing. But then I needed dogs to do it. And I go home for Christmas break and I see my dad and my dog interacting. I was like, this is perfect.

• 15:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can you tell me about? Your family dog?

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, Oliver. He sadly passed away a couple of years ago, so it's really sweet that his memory now lives on in this research. He was like a beagle, boxer, pointer mix. We got him from a shelter when I was like in fifth grade and him and my dad were like so tight. So we cleared out the living room. We moved all the furniture away and I just asked my dad to do things that people would think is positive. So like seeing a leash, seeing a treat, getting praise, being played with, and then things that people would think Oliver doesn't like. So seeing the cat, the vacuum cleaner, being reprimanded. I just filmed everything to make sure that I got like a bunch of videos that I could then figure out how to edit them.

• 15:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  So if you're trying to study whether we can tell if dogs are happy or sad, how do you know if Oliver likes cats or vacuums in the first place?

• 15:57Speaker 03

  One was just like we wanted to do like general perceptions of people. So like what would generally people associate positive or negative with dogs? But that is like a good point that has been brought up a lot is that I don't really know how Oliver was feeling with those things. You'd need to actually do some different type of studies to see how Oliver was actually feeling.

• 16:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  But ultimately, in fairness to you, right? Like you're not studying what Oliver is feeling, right? You're studying what we think he's feeling.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. So I did the videos. All you saw was Oliver on a black background. And then I set up this survey, sent it out to ASU psychology undergraduates. We had like 400 participants in the first study and first showed them six videos of Oliver on a black background. So three were when Oliver was in a positive situation and three were when Oliver was in a negative situation and showed them just the video of Oliver on a black background and said, how happy or sad you think Oliver is and also how calm or agitated? And then we showed them the original videos with my dad in there. You could see everything. And this time their responses were different. So before, when they couldn't see the backgrounds, all they saw was Oliver,

• 17:10Speaker 03

  they could not tell the difference between positive or negative videos. But suddenly, when they could see everything, they saw the context, they saw my dad. They rated the positive videos as Oliver feeling happy and they rated the negative videos as Oliver feeling sad.

• 17:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can you show me some of these videos?

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Let me open up my Dropbox. Okay, here we go.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  So you can see that.

• 17:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, he's so cute.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Okay, I'll play it.

• 17:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Kind of like looking around, licking his chops a little bit.

• 17:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Seems kind of like a neutral.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Okay, so what would you think the dog is feeling?

• 17:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  I would say he seems relatively happy.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Okay, all right, now, all right, ready?

• 17:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, God, no, he seems so sad now. Yeah, so Oliver looks exactly the same, but now that I see your dad yelling at him, it seems like he's learning a lesson now.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  So what do you think this study tells us about us or about dogs or how we relate to dogs?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  I think number one, we're just not as smart as we think we are when it comes to understanding our dogs. And sometimes people are like, that's really depressing, Holly. And I'm like, no, no, it's okay, because now we can actually start to pay attention. Now we can like, recognize that we do this and start to look at our own dogs and just kind of get away from like blanket statements of, oh, tail wagging equals happiness, barking equals upset, and actually pay attention to your own dog. I'm also trying to develop a new theory for animal emotion.

• 18:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  A new theory of animal emotion or a new theory of dog emotion?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  My proposed theory is just to start from like a species specific point of view. And maybe like, dogs have their own set of emotions and try to figure out what emotional capabilities they might have that we humans could never even comprehend because we're not dogs. So instead of looking for what does happiness look in a dog, let's come up with just like a brand new word. Maybe dogs have some type of like happiness, but it's like subservience because they like love to do things for us. And then we can like look at their behavior in this context and kind of piece together bits and then come up with a whole new dog emotion.

• 19:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's really interesting. So you're kind of saying, let's not try to put them on our terms. Let's let's see them on their terms.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly.

• 19:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  So what if we stopped treating dogs like fuzzy little humans? What would it be like to see dogs on their terms, not ours? In a minute, we talk to a human who tried to become a dog. Woof.

• 20:00Speaker 05

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• 20:59Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 21:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Why don't we start with your name and what you do? Like how you introduce yourself at a dinner party?

• 21:36Speaker 05

  Well, I might not say this at a dinner party because then the whole dinner party will be about dogs. But I'm Alexandra Horowitz and I run the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College in New York City, and I study what it's like to be a dog.

• 21:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  That is one thing, you're right. You can't, you can't say that to people. It'll just derail any conversation.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's really, if I want myself to be the center of attention, that's, I guess, the thing to say. But often I don't. So yeah, I don't lead with it.

• 22:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so in the previous segment, we just heard how people can misinterpret their dogs. They can maybe think they're feeling something, and maybe they're not feeling something. But you, you know exactly what they're feeling, right?

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Definitely not. But that's, that is entirely what I'm interested in.

• 22:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 22:27Speaker 05

  Sure. And I guess part of the first step is to kind of forget about my automatic assumptions about what they're feeling, which is, which is a very normal step for people to take, especially people who live with dogs. But it's from our point of view, and I think we have to try to take the dog's point of view.

• 22:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so how do you start to take the dog's point of view? What does that even mean?

• 22:53Speaker 05

  So they are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense. And my interest is in saying like, well, okay, like, let's try to understand the dog's way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they're just like us, you know, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I'm sitting on the couch.

• 23:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I think the best way maybe to describe what it's like to take that seriously, to take sort of a nose-first perspective of the world, is to ask you about your experience doing this. You kind of did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog? How should I put that?

• 23:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I tried to sort of step into some of the dog's behaviors, I guess, in order to a little bit understand them. Because here's one thing about smell versus vision. We're visual creatures, let's acknowledge, right? We see the world first. But if you're a smelling creature, I thought, well, you know, how do you, how do you see the world? Smells don't just appear when you open your nose, when you exist in the space.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right? They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground or smelling objects that are nose height. And they sniff a lot more than we do. You know, our sniffs are pretty feeble little sniffs. And they'll do seven sniffs a second if they want to get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things. I mean, that was just the first step is going around and saying like, all right, what are smells like down at dog height? And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it?

• 24:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here. You're walking around. Where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height?

• 24:45Speaker 05

  Well, I did this in New York City, right? Where I live.

• 24:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it's New York City.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  Oh, no. People moved away from me, you know? That's for sure. That's not.

• 24:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did. Where he sniffed, I would lean down and sniff with him. I would get to his height, see what he sniffed, and try to smell it myself, right? Is it a tree post protecting a tree from, you know, people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass? Something in the grass that is super interesting to him that I try to smell? I didn't sniff other dog butts because there are other issues involved there. But if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.

• 25:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog?

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Well, I think the big lesson for me was that unlike the way I had kind of characterized smells in my life, which I think is very human, as kind of good or bad, right? Smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell or something unappealing. Like in New York, there are lots of those smells, like garbage in the summer. But for dogs, I think smells are just information. They're just information about the way the world is. So their world is wrought of smells, the way ours is wrought of visual images.

• 26:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, when I think of looking at the world, I kind of create, I don't know, a spatial map of the world, right? Like, I'll walk through my apartment and I'll look around. Here's the door, here's the window, here's the hall. If you're doing something like that through smell, on the one hand, I have no idea what that means, right? I have no idea how to wrap my head around that. But what does that mean for the world you live in if you're mapping it by smelling it?

• 26:49Speaker 05

  Well, a space inside, I think, is sort of redefined in smell as being less static, right? So smells move. That's one of the interesting things about them. So we know this. You have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table, and you can smell it on the other side of the table, right? The smell comes out of it. So where that coffee is, is like a slightly different space, maybe, to a, let's say, purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature. It's right in the cup to me, but to somebody who's seeing the world through smell, it's in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air.

• 27:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's fascinating.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  That doesn't mean that there's nothing concrete and real. It just means that it's a little more transient than we see.

• 27:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah. If I were to think about what that means for what it's like to be a dog, right? It feels a lot more chaotic. I mean, if I'm, again, walking through my apartment, if I go into my living room and I'm like, okay, here's the couch. It's just right here. I can put my hand on the couch, and then I can put my hand a little bit to the side, and there's no couch. And I feel like if I just smelled everything, everything would be kind of, kind of moving and fading and coming back, and it would be blurry and chaotic.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  I think chaos, the idea that it's chaotic, is just because, you know, we aren't using our noses this way. You know, if you look at dogs' behavior, it doesn't seem very chaotic. I mean, their behavior kind of is consistent with this just very organized but different way of seeing.

• 28:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  It also feels like if things that a dog is smelling are changing all the time, it feels like the way they're, they might be interacting with the world would depend a lot on time.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think time is in smell.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  My presence in this room really smells to my dog. And when I've been gone for an hour, I think I'm still sort of in the room to them, but a little less.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  And after a day, I'm a lot less in the room.

• 29:06Speaker 05

  And so they're sort of noting time, time passing by the changeability of smells.

• 29:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wow. That is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad. I don't know, imagining you fading slowly out of a room, it feels like a very different type of thing to experience.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe. I haven't ever thought of it as sad. I mean, in a way, it's, there's something reassuring in the fact, and maybe even alarming, I suppose, but that, that I'm still here when I'm not here for them, right? And that when I come home and I've pet another dog, or I've had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, that they can kind of experience that by just smelling me and seeing where I've been. To me, that's kind of extra neat, not melancholy.

• 29:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, a lot of the people we've heard from in this episode, they talk about this, this ability to understand their dog and this connection they have. And then talking to Holly, talking to you, we're actually just really different from dogs. We can connect with dogs. We have these points of overlap. We can have relationships, but we are clearly extremely, extremely different. What does that difference mean to you? Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting?

• 30:31Speaker 05

  I mean, as an experimenter, I do find it daunting that they're quite different than than we are perceptually and therefore probably cognitively, but also exciting, right? There's a lot of possibilities, a lot of things we can investigate and learn. As a person who lives with dogs, there's the mystery of it, the mystery of what it's like to be a smelling creature and how we kind of get, even though there's this fundamental difference between us, we coexist and seem to share a lot of things, at least share space during the day, right? Share a life. I find that mystery kind of delightful and I don't try to solve it in my ordinary life.

• 31:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, we've been hearing from listeners about whether they understand their dogs and a lot of them are like, yeah, totally. And I wonder, you know, you're someone who understands exactly how much we don't understand our dogs. But I'm also curious, do you think you understand your dogs?

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Uh-uh. Definitely not. I mean, I don't think I do and I don't know how anybody could, really. But, you know, they're familiar to me and we use all the anthropomorphic words that everybody uses to talk about our sense of whether they're feeling depressed or grumpy or proud or whatever, but that's just a gloss for me. I don't really know what they're like and what their feelings are at any moment and whether they choose to stay with me if they had an option, you know? It's a, it's a very puzzling thing, living with, with dogs and I, and I'm okay with that.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  As a scientist, I think I've just grown more and more agnostic, you know? I just feel like I know less and less in some ways because I see how much more I didn't even imagine was, was out there. And that- That's delightful to me. Yeah. It's not to me about pinning it down and saying, well, now we have the answers. I mean, what's the fun in that? Then you something that's pinned down and sort of completely understood. You'd put that away, you know? I like that it's that that knowledge is ever elusive.

• 32:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  Kind of like a dog.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  At least one that doesn't come when you call. Yeah.

• 33:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  This episode was produced by Miles Bryan. It was edited by our executive producer, Miranda Kennedy and Noreen Khan. Fact checking by Melissa Hirsch, engineering by Patrick Boyd. And before we let you go, we want to ask about AI friendships. Do you have regular conversations with your friends known as ChatGPT or Quad or Gemini? We're not talking intimate relationships, but if you do have regular chats with some kind of LLM, we want to hear from you. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545. I'm Noam Hassenfeld. This is Explain It to Me. And once again, meet the Beagles.

• 34:19Speaker 03

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• 34:49Speaker 03

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