National Geographic: Dogs understand praise the same way we do. Here's why that matters.

 In 2016, a team of scientists discovered that dogs’ brains, like those of humans, compute the intonation and meaning of a word separately—although dogs use their right brain hemisphere to do so, whereas we use our left hemisphere. Still, a mystery remained: Do their brains go through the same steps to process approval? [...]

When the scientists studied scans of the brains of pet dogs, they found that theirs, like ours, process the sounds of spoken words in a hierarchical manner—analyzing first the emotional component with the older region of the brain, the subcortical regions, and then the words’ meaning with the newer part, the cortex. (Read how dogs are more like us than we thought.) [...]

The study “suggests that what we say and how we say it are both important to dogs,” David Reby, an ethologist at the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom, said by email.

“We may infer that from our interactions with dogs, but it is somewhat surprising as dogs do not speak, and their [own] communication system [barking] does not have a clear separation between meaning and intonation.”

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The Conversation: We groom dogs in our own image: the cuter they are, the harder we fall

One argument is pets piggyback on this tendency, with their cuteness inspiring us to care for them. Certainly, we often treat pets like children and consider them to be members of the family. [...]

To increase cuteness, researchers made the dog’s eyes larger, the jowls smaller, or increased the space between the eyes. To make the dog more human-like, they applied colour to the dog’s irises, or gave the dog a visible smile. People typically preferred the dogs with cuter or more human-like traits. [...]

A cautionary note to end on, then, is we must keep animal welfare top of mind. It’s fine to make over a dog who enjoys it, but let’s not cause dogs stress just for the sake of entertainment.

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PBS: Dogs poop in alignment with Earth’s magnetic field, study finds

The study suggests that dogs are sensitive to small variations in Earth’s magnetic field. After examining 70 dogs — made up of 37 breeds — over two years, 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations, researchers found that under “calm magnetic field conditions,” dogs preferred to “excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis,” avoiding east-west altogether. Dogs were observed in a free-roaming environment, meaning they were not leashed and not influenced by walls or roads that would influence linear movement. [...]

Why do the dogs prefer the north-south axis and avoid east-west? That was unclear, according to the study: It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it “consciously” (i.e., whether the magnetic field is sensorial perceived (the dogs “see”, “hear” or “smell” the compass direction or perceive it as a haptic stimulus) or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they “feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable” in a certain direction).

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SciShow: These Adorable Wolves Play Fetch – And Defy Dogma

We thought that we taught dogs how to play fetch, but some adorable wolf pups may have just proved us wrong. Also some plants may be immortal?

Science Alert: Cats Do Bond Securely to Their Humans - Maybe Even More So Than Dogs

This may not come as a huge surprise to those who live with cat companions, but it suggests two important things. Firstly, it looks like we've underestimated the depth of the bond cats can form with their people. Additionally, it shows that dogs don't have a monopoly on secure social bonding with Homo sapiens. [...]

In their behavioural experiment, the research team observed how cats respond to their owners in a strange environment. Previous research on rhesus monkeys (the controversial wire mother experiments reported in 1958) and dogs (a much more ethically sound experiment reported last year) had shown that both species form secure and insecure attachments. [...]

Interestingly, those rates - 64.3 percent and 65.8 percent - are pretty close to the 65 percent secure attachment rate seen in human infants. And cats showed a secure attachment rate slightly higher than found in a test of 59 companion dogs published in 2018; the canines were 61 percent secure and 39 percent insecure.

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The Guardian: Do our pets ever really love us – or do they just stick around for the food?

Studies of brain chemicals add further weight to this relationship. In dogs and humans (in fact all mammals) the behaviours that bond individuals are maintained through a cocktail of molecules that are absorbed in different ways by the brain. Many of these are regulated by brain hormones that include vasopressin and oxytocin, the (dramatically over-hyped) “love” molecule. In all mammals (including humans) production of this hormone spikes when individuals are sexually aroused, while giving birth and while nursing offspring. It also rises when we see those that we love, particularly close family members. Interestingly, dogs respond with an oxytocin surge not only when interacting with one another, but also (unlike nearly all other mammals) when interacting with humans.

A similar phenomenon occurs with cats. One small-scale study suggests that cats do receive an oxytocin boost upon being petted by their owners, so there may be love there, but it reflects one-fifth of the amount seen in dogs. If anything sums up cats, it’s this. [...]

Birds, however, are another story. Birds are far more likely to feel a warmth for their owners that you could term eros. A parrot that is tenderly stroked in the wrong places by its minder, for instance, will often misread friendship signals as foreplay and begin producing sex hormones. Should you wish not to sexually excite a parrot, try not to stroke down its back or on, or under, its wings. These are the areas that males and females preen in the early stages of their courtship in the wild. A stroke like this is like the kiss and a cuddle that readies them for sex. Upon discovering this fact, I realised I had more than once inadvertently sexed up a parrot.

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Atlas Pro: The Geography of Pets

ScienceDaily: Study shows dogs can accurately sniff out cancer in blood

Dogs have smell receptors 10,000 times more accurate than humans', making them highly sensitive to odors we can't perceive. A new study has shown that dogs can use their highly evolved sense of smell to pick out blood samples from people with cancer with almost 97 percent accuracy. The results could lead to new cancer-screening approaches that are inexpensive and accurate without being invasive. [...]

For the new study, Junqueira and her colleagues used a form of clicker training to teach four beagles to distinguish between normal blood serum and samples from patients with malignant lung cancer. Although one beagle -- aptly named Snuggles -- was unmotivated to perform, the other three dogs correctly identified lung cancer samples 96.7 percent of the time and normal samples 97.5 percent of the time. [...]

BioScentDx plans to use canine scent detection to develop a non-invasive way of screening for cancer and other life-threatening diseases. As a next step, the company launched a breast cancer study in November in which participants donate samples of their breath for screening by trained cancer-sniffing dogs. The researchers also plan to separate the samples into their chemical components and present these to the dogs to isolate the substances causing the odor that the dogs detect.

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The Guardian: Pet sounds: why your dog loves listening to Bob Marley

Far from being a novelty, dog-oriented music is fast becoming a successful new genre, with the production company RelaxMyDog at the forefront of the trend. Founded in 2011 by entrepreneur Amman Ahmed and producer Ricardo Henriquez, the service reaches an audience of 10 million users a month: 600 years’ worth of their content was streamed in September alone.[...]

Ahmed is coy when explaining the somewhat vague musical formula behind their success, though. It comprises, he says, of “a range of frequencies that the dogs can hear, combined with music that is designed to be relaxing to humans, since if the human is relaxed, that energy can be projected on to the dog also”. Rather than engaging in scientific research to influence their compositions, “the best research comes from actual users”, he says, who provide regular feedback through their YouTube channel’s 600,000 subscribers.

One such piece of feedback was that dogs were responding well to reggae music, which has led to a new series of dog reggae. This finding is backed up by a 2017 study conducted by the Scottish SPCA and the University of Glasgow. The research found that while classical music had an initial calming effect on the dogs, after a few days they became bored. Instead, reggae and soft rock came out as the best genres for reducing stress, barking and heart rates. The SPCA’s head of research, Gilly Mendes Ferreira, speculates this is because “those genres have a rhythm that is similar to the dogs’ own heart rate. When a puppy is feeling stressed it will snuggle into its mother and use her heartbeat as relaxation, so this music mimics that.”

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IFLScience: Do Dogs Have Feelings?

Research has shown time and time again the positive impact pet ownership can have on our lives. Indeed, a study of 975 dog-owning adults, found that in times of emotional distress most people were more likely to turn to their dogs than their mothers, fathers, siblings, best friends, or children.[...]

Sigmund Freud is generally acknowledged as the accidental pioneer of canine-assisted therapy. During his psychotherapy sessions in the 1930s, a chow chow called Jofi stayed alongside him in the office. Freud noticed that patients became more relaxed and open when Jofi was present, and it helped him to build a rapport.

But the official beginning of animal-assisted therapy is generally linked to World War II, when a Yorkshire terrier called Smoky accompanied corporal William Lynne when visiting service hospitals in New Guinea. Her presence lifted the spirits of wounded soldiers.

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The Atlantic: Why Do Humans Talk to Animals If They Can’t Understand? (AUG 18, 2017)

“First of all,” Herzog told me, “talking to our pets is absolutely natural. Human beings are natural anthropomorphizers, meaning we naturally tend to [ascribe] all kinds of thoughts and meanings to other things in our lives.”

Humans can do this with just about anything—one might feel bad for the colored pencil that never gets used, or get angry at the phone that won’t hold a charge, or feel real grief over news that a hitchhiking robot has been abused. But that impulse is especially strong for things that are or seem animate, like animals and AI—and when it comes to pets, people often think of them as little members of the family. So of course people talk to them. But even though it might feel like I’m talking to my pets the same way I talk to other people, studies show consistent distinctions between the two. [...]

But though the instinct to anthropomorphize is innate, there are circumstances that make someone more likely to do so. In a 2008 study, researchers tested two motivations for treating non-human entities like thinking, feeling humans: first, that someone lacking social interaction needs to “create” a human to hang out with; second, that someone lacking control wants to feel more secure in uncertain circumstances, and anthropomorphizing allows him to predict an animal’s action based on interpersonal experience. Both hypotheses bore out. Chronically lonely participants were much more likely to describe their pets with words suggesting those pets provided emotional support—thoughtful, considerate, sympathetic—than participants with vibrant social lives, and participants who self-identified as desiring control in their daily lives were more likely to assign emotions and conscious will to dogs they were unfamiliar with than those who were more willing to hand over the reins, as it were. [...]

Beyond dogs, there’s little research on animal understanding of language, but evidence does suggest dogs process language similarly to humans. In a study led by Hungary’s Family Dog Project, dogs who went willingly into an fMRI were played recordings of their trainers, and their brains, like ours, processed familiar words in the left hemisphere and intonation on the right. It’s tricky to say dogs understand language, but they can at least recognize it. Or some of it.

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SciShow: Do Animals Appreciate Music?

Animals might be music lovers, but how can we know? Is the ability to perceive and appreciate music a shared human and animal experience?

SciShow Psych: Why Does Pet Therapy Work? (It's Not Just Cute Dogs)

Many studies have shown that pets can relieve anxiety, stress, and provide comfort, but why pet therapy is effective has a lot more to do with us than our furry pals. 

Quartz: Can there be a “very good dog?” Philosophy has an answer

In other words, Kant didn’t believe a dog like Mu could think or distinguish between bad and good because she isn’t self-aware. For this reason, she is not moral.

This view—which is known as human exceptionalism—persists today. But increasingly philosophers and scientists argue that animals are moral and that we humans may just be insufficiently aware of their inner lives to understand how or why they decide to do what they do. For example, Mark Rowlands, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and author of The Philosopher and the Wolf, among other books, believes his dog and wolf are good. [...]

However, because animals may not necessarily be able to scrutinize their behavior—or reflect on the reason they act—he argues in the Philosopher’s Magazine, they cannot be held responsible for their actions even if they are bad. From Rowland’s perspective, they are moral creatures even if they are not rational; in this sense, he is like Zhao Zhou, recognizing their Buddha nature but doubtful of their self-awareness. [...]

Not only that, animals can extend their sense of justice or empathy to other species, not just their own kind. Bekoff wrote a book called Wild Justice with moral philosopher Jessica Pierce, also from the University of Colorado. She told the Telegraph in 2009, “There are cases of dolphins helping humans to escape from sharks and elephants that have helped antelope escape from enclosures. While it is difficult to know for certain that there is cross species empathy, it is hard to argue against it.”

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SciShow: Do Placebos Work For Animals? Yes, Weirdly Enough

Aeon: Die like a dog

In human medicine, we’re used to implementing any and every life-saving intervention right up to the very end. As a medical intern 20 years ago, I remember thinking about the futility of that approach with patients in pain and suffering from multisystem organ failure, sustained only by machines and a regimen of some 30 or 40 medications, and unlikely to ever make it out of the hospital. What was the point? Whatever happened to quality of life? But those reservations be damned, we never gave up, and among the interns who transferred care to each other from shift to shift, the dictum of patients ‘not dying on my watch’ was something to which we all held fast. [...]

As a veterinarian, my wife viewed things altogether differently. To her, putting our dog to sleep didn’t represent throwing in the towel as it seemed to me, but a compassionate way to preempt unnecessary but inevitable pain and suffering down the line. As she saw it, we owe this option to our pets as stewards of their care, especially given that animals can’t understand pain or decide for themselves just how much suffering they are willing to tolerate. [...]

In 2009, US legislation that would have allowed physicians to be compensated by Medicare for providing voluntary counselling to patients about options for end-of-life care was defeated due to political uproar over ‘death panels’. And yet, as I discuss in the World Journal of Psychiatry in 2015, human euthanasia is being increasingly considered and sanctioned both in the US and abroad. As life-extending medical advances over the past 50 years have fuelled growing concerns about prolongation of suffering and loss of autonomy, the euthanasia movement of the 1930s has gained momentum, evolving into the modern ‘right to die’ and ‘death with dignity’ movements that challenge us to consider what constitutes a ‘good death’. Today, some form of voluntary active euthanasia – death by administration of a lethal dose of medication to avoid pain and suffering – is legal in several states in the US, as well as in Japan and parts of Europe including Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Netherlands.  

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The Conversation: Why losing a dog can be harder than losing a relative or friend

Many times, I’ve had friends guiltily confide to me that they grieved more over the loss of a dog than over the loss of friends or relatives. Research has confirmed that for most people, the loss of a dog is, in almost every way, comparable to the loss of a human loved one. Unfortunately, there’s little in our cultural playbook—no grief rituals, no obituary in the local newspaper, no religious service—to help us get through the loss of a pet, which can make us feel more than a bit embarrassed to show too much public grief over our dead dogs.  [...]

Our strong attachment to dogs was subtly revealed in a recent study of “misnaming.” Misnaming happens when you call someone by the wrong name, like when parents mistakenly calls one of their kids by a sibling’s name. It turns out that the name of the family dog also gets confused with human family members, indicating that the dog’s name is being pulled from the same cognitive pool that contains other members of the family. (Curiously, the same thing rarely happens with cat names.) [...]

The loss of a dog can also seriously disrupt an owner’s daily routine more profoundly than the loss of most friends and relatives. For owners, their daily schedules—even their vacation plans—can revolve around the needs of their pets. Changes in lifestyle and routine are some of the primary sources of stress.

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Vox: The surprisingly weak scientific case for emotional support animals

How is it legal to bring your duck on the plane? Under the federal Air Carrier Access Act, passengers are allowed to bring animals aboard by showing a letter from a mental health clinician or doctor asserting that the pet is part of their therapy. But the law is surprisingly vague about which species can come on board and gives airlines significant discretion. “You are never required to accommodate certain unusual service animals (e.g., snakes, other reptiles, ferrets, rodents, and spiders) as service animals in the cabin,” it reads.

Yet as a quick Google search will show, it’s possible to obtain these letters online for a small fee. Some passengers may very well be exploiting the law to bring pets on planes. And stories about peacocks and ducks in booties on planes are increasingly leading ESAs (and their handlers) to be treated as a punchline. In the New York Times, columnist David Leonhardt called the animals a “scam” and “one of the downsides of a modern culture that too often fetishizes individual preference and expression over communal well-being.” [...]

Molly Crossman is a psychology researcher at Yale who published a 2016 review in The Journal of Clinical Psychology of the evidence on using animals to counter psychological distress. Here’s what she found: “The clearest conclusion in the field is that we cannot yet draw clear conclusions.” [...]

Basically, in treatments for anxiety that work, we ask people to face their fears. We work with them to gradually approach the things they’ve avoided. These treatments work really well. They’re some of sort of the best mental health treatments that we have. A concern we have in those kinds of treatments is that people will feel like, “I can only approach this terrifying situation if they have my mom with me, or my blankie,” or whatever.

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The Guardian: Meet the dogs of Chernobyl – the abandoned pets that formed their own canine community

Tarzan isn’t alone. There are approximately 300 stray dogs in the 2,600km² zone. They live among the moose and lynx, the hares and wolves that have also found a home here. But while the Mongolian horses and Belarusian bears were recently introduced to the area, and other animals have come in as opportunists, the dogs are native. [...]

Life is not easy for the Chernobyl strays. Not only must they endure harsh Ukrainian winters with no proper shelter, but they often carry increased levels of radiation in their fur and have a shortened life expectancy. Few live beyond the age of six.

But it’s not all bad news. The dogs that live near the zone’s checkpoints have little huts made for them by the guards, and some are wise enough to congregate near the local cafe, having learned that a human presence equals food. These canine gangs act as unofficial Chernobyl mascots, there to greet visitors who stop at Cafe Desyatka for some borscht.

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SciShow: Can Dogs Smell Fear?