Dogs

On the streets of Beijing, little old ladies coax even littler dogs to do their business. Some even bear the little plastic bags carried by civically conscious urbanite pet-lovers everywhere.

You love your dog. Does your dog love you back? Is the love that an owner feels for her dog reciprocated? That's the question that a group of Swedish and Danish researchers wanted to answer.

Here’s something curious. The phrase “man’s best friend” didn’t appear in print, according to Google’s n-grams, until after the year 1750.

Halloween is a peculiar holiday, especially for dogs. We two-legged beings all look different, and what’s with the constant doorbell-ringing?

I recently saw a clip of Neil Patrick Harris hosting the 2013 Emmys. He was doing a bit about Google Glass and said he was watching an episode of American Horror Story on his contacts while hosting the show.

With a winning combination of cuteness, digging-osity, and the precision focus of a heat-seaking missile, Este the truffle dog has helped blaze a trail together with scientists that could both enliven American diets and help support American pecan growers.

Boulder, CO better count its chickens and get its ducks in a row because the Animal Behavior Society is on its way! That’s right. This weekend, I’m off to the 50th Annual Conference of the Animal Behavior Society in Boulder, CO (Twitter/Facebook).

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'.

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.

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.

…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?