Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. Let’s get [...]

Are you suffering abdominal pain or discomfort, fatigue, nausea, flatulence, heartburn, and acid reflux? Have you been having difficulty urinating, or experiencing pain while doing so? Oh, and one other question—have you been spontaneously expelling microscopic bits of disintegrated dog fetuses through your urethra? If you answered “yes” to all of the above, then you may [...]

In previous posts, I’ve discussed my fascination with dogs, such as this recent controversial piece mentioning those good-natured pit bulls whose unearned reputations often precede them because of a few maladjusted, vicious outliers. Yet I’ve never seen anything quite like the canines of Sofia, Bulgaria, from where I’ve just returned after a week of teaching [...]

Until recently, the only association I made between dogs and pantyhose would have involved an unfortunate trip to the vet. Of the inanimate objects pulled from pets’ gastrointestinal tracts — from drywall and hearing aids to corn cobs and toy cars — pantyhose, and their cousins, socks and underwear, top the list. But last week, [...]

I was probably 12 years old (fine, 13) the last time I played with Barbies. School was closed for a snow day, and one of my best friends trudged over to my house for mac and cheese and Barbies. But after choosing our dolls and clothing, we stopped. We couldn’t remember what came next. All [...]

Taste-testing. © Julie Hecht Dogs don’t write. At least not in a way easily understood by people, and certainly not with a pen or pencil. You could argue that dogs “write” with their urine. Some dogs seem quite familiar with Morse code — evident by a trail of little plops left behind — while others [...]

Where did the Australian dingo go? Once present throughout that country, the feared predator (Canis lupus dingo) in its current form is on its way to extinction as it is either killed or breeds and hybridizes with domesticated dogs. With the disappearance of the purebred dingo comes the loss of an important part of the [...]

Millions of people around the world come home to four legs and a wagging tail, and many spend some of their time together playing. While dog-dog play has been studied extensively, dog-person play, which takes on a different form and appears to have different rules, has not attracted nearly as much scholarly attention. At the [...]

Doing surgery in a tent on a tropical island is harder work than you’d think. It gets so hot that the sweat trickles from your surgical cap into your eyes, and when it rains on the tarp roof you can’t hear what your anesthetist is saying. I know this because I’ve worked on spay and [...]

In shows like Lassie, I was always impressed at the amount of information a dog was able to convey to a human: ‘What’s that, Lassie? A little girl trapped in a building that you tried to reach but then couldn’t owing to the fire that caught alight to the fence surrounding it?’ I never owned [...]

Have you ever wondered what makes you right- or left-handed? Well, in humans and other mammals, the brain is divided down the middle, or ‘lateralized’. One of the effects of this is that people can be right-handed or left-handed (having better motor skill with one hand or the other). This is because one half of [...]

NEW YORK—When it comes to brain power, we humans like to think we’re the animal kingdom’s undisputed champions. But in the past few decades we’ve had to make a lot of room on our mantle place for shared trophies. Problem-solving? Sorry, but crows and octopuses do that too. Tool use? Primates, birds and even fish [...]

Dogs are great at learning things. They love to be taught how to fetch, roll over, and heel, for instance. You can also teach them physics. Physicist Chad Orzel has proven this with his two books “How to Teach Physics to your Dog” and the more specialized, “How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog“. Here, [...]

They may have the largest physical variety among all animal species on Earth, but dogs can still recognise one of their own over any other animal based on simple images of their faces. Since their domestication somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 years ago, dogs have been learning to use facial cues as an important part [...]

If a human points his or her finger at something, a dog might infer that there’s hidden food, while the chimpanzee remains more or less clueless about the meaning behind that sort of non-verbal communication. As dogs have evolved in a social space occupied by human social partners, they’ve gained the unique ability not only [...]

Just a quick announcement that I’ll be on a short segment of The Aaron Rand Show, on Montreal’s CJAD 800 radio station this afternoon tomorrow afternoon, June 6, around 3:45pm eastern (12:45pm pacific). The topic will be dog guilt. If you’re in or around Montreal, I expect you can simply tune into AM 800. For [...]

“I walked into the house, and he was acting strange. I could tell he had done something wrong,” she told me. I pressed for further details. “His head was down, and he wasn’t making eye contact,” she explained. “Then, I found it. Under the bed.” She had spent weeks training her dog, Henry, not to [...]

Dogs are particularly good at tasks that involve communicating or cooperating with humans, which has led some researchers to speculate that they are really good at solving social tasks, more generally. For example, dogs can figure out where a human’s attention is, are really good at picking up on eye-gaze and finger pointing cues, distinguish [...]

I’ve decided I want to cover some recent research on social cognition in domesticated dogs. But first, we need some background. So here’s a repost from the old blog. Today I want to tell you about one of my most favorite studies, ever, of animals. Are you ready? It’s a FIFTY YEAR LONG longitudinal study [...]

…and what can word-learning in dogs teach us about the evolution of language in humans? What is involved in the learning of a single new word? Consider the word “tiger”, being learned by a child with already a modest vocabulary, at least for animal words. First the child must make a new entry in the [...]

Why were cats domesticated in the first place? And how? Given their relatively poor ability to socially engage with humans, it isn’t exactly clear why or how they were domesticated, or how they came to play such a significant role in human culture.

Animals dream, too! It’s definitely not a seizure, and it’s definitely not random motor actions. Those actions are totally coordinated. Poor dog must have been dreaming about a dog fight or something.