Courtesy of Larry Greenemeier
Play with Your Dog
UPDATE: Please send your video submissions to the researchers by March 31, 2013.
The Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab in NYC is investigating the different ways people and dogs play together, and we need your help (well, you and your dog’s help). We are cataloguing all the ways people play with their dogs and asking dog owners to submit short videos of their own dog-human play.
Project: Play with Your Dog is open to anyone, in any country. If you live with a dog, we want to see you play.
To participate, find or make a 30-60 second video of you and your dog playing in whatever way you like to play together, and then upload the video to our website and complete a short survey. You are also invited to add a picture of you and your dog to our Wall of Contributors.
By participating in Project: Play with Your Dog, citizen scientists are providing valuable information into the nuances and intricacies of our relationships with dogs.
Project Details
- PRINCIPAL SCIENTIST: Alexandra Horowitz and Julie Hecht
- SCIENTIST AFFILIATION: Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab, Barnard College
- DATES: Ongoing
- PROJECT TYPE: Fieldwork
- COST: Free
- GRADE LEVEL: All Ages
- TIME COMMITMENT: Variable
- HOW TO JOIN:
Visit DogHumanPlay.com and follow the instructions:
Complete a short survey
Upload a video of you and your dog playing (in whatever way you like to play together)
Share a picture of you and your dog on our Wall of Contributors (optional)
See what we're tweeting about
6 Comments
Add CommentFantastic! Can't wait to join in the fun and help science by just playing with my dog!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo much voiced concern about violation of privacy to assemble workable models of the public at large. Yet so many venues where so many willingly provide information that can be pegged to them. So many websites require "security questions" of those working through the site. Wealths of infomation available about costs of first cars purchased, distance to elementary school attended, name of best friend. And, to the extent information can be double checked, whether the user is a liar or not. Here available are types of dogs owned by people willing to participate in Citizen Science, locations where they live, types of vacations they take, types of houses they live in. Things like this should be borne in mind when "uncanny" familiarity with the public by the New World Order becomes obvious.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe information is being used for scientific research and I am PRETTY SURE if you read the fine print it will state what the information is being used for and that they will not sell your information. Paranoia much?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a couple of Australian Cattle Dogs and they're really authoritarian so bunch up and move in a herd or else you'll be nipped on the butt!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlus, you shouldn't take anybody that believes that the government dropped atomic weapons to create Hurricane Sandy too seriously. This was a movie plot, "Escape from L.A." by John Carpenter with some slight plot changes...
(If they sell my information, then they'll have to answer to the dogs!)
i'm in!!! absolutely! i hope a german shepard/coyote is acceptable!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMax is a Labrador cross, 11 years old. Like me and Mrs Jones, Max and I have a thing going on. We don't do video. We talk. That is, I talk, he listens … and he looks at me. Mostly, I merely whisper. And I look at his eyes and body language. We seem to make clear to each other what’s happening. And what to expect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMax has only three questions. What’s happening? What’ll happen next? And when do we eat? Where we walk every morning there are five or six bulls behind barbed wire. First pass, they’re too far away. But curiosity gets the better of the bovine imagination. Max’s coat is pure white.
Sure enough, coming back, there they all are, big brown eyes ignoring me, for that marvellous little running thing, sniffing all about. Is that one of us? As we approach, Max stops, turns to face me and asks, without any ambiguity in his hungry eyes, “Now?” Max loves running. And running with the bulls … who needs Pamplona?
And, like every morning, not whispering now, firm and assertive [leader of the pack], I say, NEIN! Not a German Shepherd, he understands German. Maybe, to his canine mind, I’m God. It’s his job to see that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. (Else we don’t eat.)
As soon as he hears the tone, timbre and pitch of my voice, Max adopts his self-preserving ‘ignore what isn’t there’ posture. Just like us really. And we repeat this little routine for as long as it takes, Max constantly turning and fixing me with his silent unmistakable but insistent question, “How about now?”
And, with my unambiguous verbal leash, I provide him with a way out of his crisis. Just like us really, dogs. I don’t know what a dog knows or what he thinks, if, that is, he even thinks at all, like we do. But I believe, on the basis of what sense I make of his visible behaviour, those three questions are all he needs to know or care about.
He seems to understand a lot of the noises I make. That is, he responds appropriately, according to my expectations, which is not the same thing. Sometimes these noises sound like ordinary words. Often they are no more than pieces of sound, or bits of words from three different languages.
I do believe dogs can learn to understand verbal language, in a way similar to our own, by recognising and responding instinctively to the rhythm and cadence in the music. But I seriously doubt my dog has any idea what the mangled and simulated words I use are commonly intended, and therefore taken, to mean, in the ordinary cognitive, lexicographical sense, as we are generally supposed to humanly understand it.