Dr. Karolina Westlund
Appearances
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So his pain tolerance was quite high.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Great question. Yeah, so in order to feel calm and safe – I think perhaps we should go to the core effect space, which I think is one of the three emotional models that I find very, very useful in understanding and providing a good environment for animals so that they can thrive, really.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So the core effect space is one way of depicting or conceptualizing emotions where we have like valence on the x-axis. So how pleasant or unpleasant something is. And we have arousal on the y-axis. So what you're asking is how can we...
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
make animals and i'm not just not just dogs but any species how can we put them in quadrant two of that core effect space essentially so uh low arousal and pleasant so where they're relaxed and they're feeling safe and they're they're sort of engaging socially with others and being sort of at ease, if you will. So how do we get there?
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I think that some of the things to consider is then the absence of negative emotions. So again, if we're in the core effect space in the quadrant four, with the high arousal unpleasant states, we'll find things like fear, aggression. So helping reduce that will sort of automatically help animals move to the right in the matrix.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And in the lower quadrant three, with the unpleasant low arousal state, where animals tend to end up with their sort of bored or depressed, is engaging them, providing an environment that's stimulating, that they can sort of do interesting things to help them move into the right side of the core effect space. And also to the top in that quadrant one is the high arousal, pleasant state.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But that would be like seeking or foraging behavior, exploration, play, sex. But as to your question, how do we get into quadrant two with feeling safe and sort of that warm, fuzzy feeling? So some of the things to do might be to, if the animal enjoys it coming from you, and they often have to know you in order to really appreciate it, is like tactile stimulation, so petting, essentially.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Something that might interfere is that we primates, we humans are primates and we're huggers. We tend to sort of go like this when we want to interact with an animal that we really like. And to many animals, this is restraint and really scary. And so the type of body contact that we offer to animals that we should consider whether they really enjoy it or not, whether they tolerate it or enjoy it.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And one way of doing that is to offer a consent test. So you might off your hand and scratch a little bit, ideally in a place that the animal really enjoys. So most dogs don't enjoy having a hand on top of their head, but rather perhaps here. On their neck. Or the upper chest, sort of. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So you might do that for a few seconds and then you remove your hand to see, does the animal enjoy this and will they then reinitiate that contact or not? Or will they move away? And I have this issue with my cat now that he is not very, he doesn't sort of enjoy petting as much as I do petting him. So I have to be really mindful that I really offer him the chance to say no thanks.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I also think that that nice, slow stroke, if you're sort of in a calm, emotional state yourself, Then we might tap into another interesting emotion theory, which is the polyvagal theory and this concept of co-regulation. So if you're really calm and relaxed, then you're sort of sending out these cues, these signals.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
subtle cues that other individuals are reading and picking up on and it seems that we do that with vis-a-vis also our dogs and certainly also horses it seems so that just being calm and relaxed yourself can really help relax the dog And what you say about the fast petting or patting really makes sense to me.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I know there is one study in horses that show that if you pat a horse, many horses find that aversive. So in other words, it's something that they'll work to avoid. And yet that is often how we try to reward them when they do something that we want. They do enjoy wither scratching. So back at the nape of the mane, if you scratch them there, they'll typically enjoy that.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But I would say that different animals, different individuals will have these individual preferences and just trying to see what they like. And perhaps also if you're offering your hands like this, they might even scoot around to show you which body part they want scratched once they learn the rules of that communication.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Bum scratching is a big thing for many animals. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
That's like Pandora's box there, right there.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah. So first of all, I think that actually we often do walk up to stranger dogs that we never met before. We're like, hi, can I pet him? And then we start patting on top of the animal's head.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So I think that we do do that. And then this whole discussion about dominance is really interesting because as an ethologist, how we define dominance is completely different from how most people define it. And I actually, I looked into the encyclopedia to see how is dominance defined there. And I find that there's like two lines of that definition.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Most of my students are like guardians of animals. So they're like dog owners or horse trainers or they might be veterinarians. Some of them work in a zoo as a zookeeper or animal trainer and so on.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So one is the ethological definition of dominance and one is the sociological definition of dominance. And I think that what we're doing often is that we're misusing, we're using the sociological definition differently. on animals in a way that's, I think, unfortunate. Because the ethological definition is about priority of access to resources. Here's a resource.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Here's like five individuals coming up to it. There's just one there. The dominant individual will have priority of access to that resource. The others simply have to wait or look elsewhere. And this reduces the risk of sort of confrontation and aggression and all the costs associated with that. So it's just it's normal that animals who hang out together, who are like in a stable social group,
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
will organize or have some sort of dominance hierarchy within them that allows this to take place, to reduce the risk of aggression. It tends to become exacerbated in captivity compared to in wild contexts because then the animals can disperse and there's a resource over there that they can go and get instead.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But when we house them and we're offering, specifically we're offering like here's, you have two cats or three cats and here's the food. You're putting the animals in conflict because cats are solitary hunters. So they actually do, if you have several cats, you should feed them in sort of separate locations to reduce that sort of heightened arousal that goes with that type of feeding.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So my students are really diverse and their knowledge levels is also really diverse from the sort of person who has their first dog at the age of 40 to somebody who's been training animals for 30 years.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I would not label any of those situations that you described as a dominance interaction, actually. I would rather, if the dog backs away when you confront them, I would sort of rather label that as perhaps a fearful reaction, not submissive, as in giving you priority of access to a resource.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Typically, feral dogs in the wild will form linear dominance hierarchies with regards to the access to resources. And that might shift depending on what the resource is. So it's not like it's written in stone or anything. So it's like fluid and variable, but there's still typically some sort of hierarchy when it comes to the priority of access to resources.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Then we have another social role, which is the role as a leader. And when I, as an ethologist, say leader, I mean the one that leads, that sort of walks first in line from one location to another. I like to take the example of elephants, that when they migrate, it's typically one of the old females, the matriarch, who leads the way. She's the leader, right?
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So she'll help them find, she knows where to go essentially. And there's other social roles as well. There might be the controller who is the animal who tends to initiate a change in activity. So we see this in cows, for instance, that all the cows are standing up and they're grazing. And then one cow, the controller, lies down and everybody else lies down also. They start ruminating.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
They will often synchronize their behavior, but they'll follow. It's not that one individual is sort of imposing on the others, but rather they do that and the others follow suit.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I think that we carry a lot of... And actually, we haven't mentioned this, I think, but I have very little practical experience about dogs, with dogs. I haven't lived with dogs, I haven't trained dogs, but many of my students train dogs and I help them. But that also means that I don't carry any of these...
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
sort of assumptions that you're supposed to have your dog behind you or beside you than if you don't. So, which means that I can look at that type of statement and go, really? Because I think that there's a lot of learning occurring, of course, that you teach the dog that if you stay at my side or behind me, then, you know, there won't be any unpleasantness.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But if you pull ahead, I'm going to yank you back. So there'll be an unpleasant...
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
consequence to the pulling behavior which will then influence the animal's choice in staying next to you but I think we very often what we label as dominance can very often be just if we just remove that label and we look at the animal's behavior we can explain it in other terms and again I would not use for me dominance as an ethologist has to do with the priority of access to resources
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I mean, you have to set up the situation to work for you and the animal. But again, I would not frame that in terms of... Dominance. Dogs form relationships with us. But as far as I know, from the ethological perspective, we have no role in the dominance hierarchy among dogs. They know that we are different and they will respond.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
They will learn to expect that if in this context that will happen, in that context that will happen. And so we can often reframe that from a different learning system than dominance.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
First of all, I think that we humans are also an animal species. And that we tend to sort of put ourselves on a pedestal and thinking that we are one and then animals are like the other, as if it were homogeneous, which it really isn't. So each animal species have their own adaptations. We have our own adaptations.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And each animal, all the other animal species that we surround ourselves with do as well. So I don't know if that really answers your question, but I tend to. So the work I do is to sort of try to help animals live better lives with humans.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And that very often starts with understanding how that animal species would live in the wild and the type of life that they have, whether they're a predator, whether they're a prey animal species, how they process the world, the type of information that they take in. So, for instance, we might see a dog whose wagging is tail.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And we might think that it's only happy dogs that wag their tails, but actually tail wagging is seen in many different contexts. And we might think of it as a visual communication thing. But actually, it could be that they're dispersing scent. The tail wag will sort of, that scent will waft over to you so you can take in information about my current emotional state.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So one very interesting thing is that the dog wagging with the predominant left wag.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Left for the dog. So he's wagging on the left-hand side of his body. Tends to be associated with negative emotional states. And on the right tends to be associated with positive emotional states. And the same cats tend to look at the world from the left when in a negative emotional state and from the right when in a positive emotional state.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So taking in that information with this eye.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So they're looking at the stimulus with their left eye if that stimulus is fear-inducing.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, full sweeps. And I don't know the details here, but certainly the type of tail wag, whether it's sort of very low and fast or whether it's high and sort of stiff, will communicate different emotional states.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So studies have shown that we humans are actually, we learn to read dogs by exposure, even passive exposure, just living in an environment. And apparently, if we live in a culture where dogs live close with humans, we get better in reading dogs than in cultures where dogs don't interact that much with humans. So there's that. And there's also the issue that we are typically better at reading dogs
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
gross body language than we are at reading facial expressions apparently one of the reasons being that dogs move different facial muscles when they make emotional facial expressions they move different muscles than what humans do what can you tell us about the facial expressions of dogs
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Well, there's been some studies in the last couple of years that have looked at which muscles are moving when, in which contexts. So they'll expose the dog to different types of stimuli and they'll film the dog and look at what muscles are twitching, where is the face moving in response to these stimuli.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So those types of studies have found that, you know, when a dog is exposed to, let's say, thunder or firework sounds, they will show a certain facial configuration. When their owner returns home after not being seen for several hours, they will show a different facial configuration and so on. It seems that they do show facial expressions.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
It's just that some of those facial expressions are – it's not the same muscles that we show in the corresponding emotional state. So that would, I think, bias us to misreading dogs' facial expressions from that perspective. But then again, if we live with dogs, we start – we won't observe just the facial expression. We will observe the entire dog.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And we're often better off reading their body language than we are reading their facial expression. Even though I think that studies also show that the face is where we look first.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Most probably does. That play bow that you're describing is what's referred to as a meta signal for play. So it's typically shown in a play context, and I haven't seen it described. But then again, I'm not a dog owner, but I haven't seen it described in the context of let's go for a walk.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But certainly in the play context, as far as I know, dogs play a bit differently with humans than they do with other dogs, but they do enjoy playing with humans. And sometimes I think we humans have a hard time knowing whether what we're seeing is play or aggression, because there will be elements from the aggressive repertoire within a play bow.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But typically what we can do then is look for what's referred to as MARS, M-A-R-S. So M being the meta signals. So those play bows or in other species, it will be other behaviors that are sort of indicating that I want to play. I know chimpanzees have like 30 or 50 different meta signals for play. And MAA is for activity shift. So we'll see different behaviors.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
They might be chasing, they might be pouncing, they might be wrestling, biting each other. But you'll see these activity shifts and it's not in the same order as it would be if they were truly fighting. Right. M-A-R-R is for role reversals.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So you'll see that the dogs, if they're of different sizes or different sort of stamina or how big they are or how competent fighters they would be, that they'll take turns winning and losing.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, because it's not fun playing if you lose all the time. So in order to keep playing, the bigger dog needs to lose sometimes. So in order to keep this interaction going, that's the way to do that. And the last one, S, is self-handicap. So the larger dog will self-handicap themselves. You might see them doing a tug-of-war. And the large dog is just standing there and holding the thing.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And the small dog is like pulling and really trying to get the thing. And the big dog is just standing there doing nothing. But then if a human takes over the toy and starts pulling, then the big dog will engage and start showing more of his strength and escalate that behavior.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Oh, I think so. Absolutely. I can't say I've seen any studies on it, but just, yeah.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
As an ethologist, I tend to take a step back and look at sort of the species in general. And horses are prey animals. They are also herd animals. And I think that we as humans, we tend to not really understand how different animal species can be from ourselves in how they perceive the world and what's important to them. So horses being prey animals means that they're usually quite vigilant.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I think it makes sense from the evolutionary perspective that social animals who live in a cohesive social group are good at reading each other's emotional state and also good at sort of trying to buffer negative emotions if it's possible to do that. And so I would expect it with any of the sort of more cognitively advanced species, I would expect some type of empathy.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Fairness, yeah. There was this experiment done on capuchin monkeys by Franz Duval and his team. And apparently they did it and they published a paper on it and nobody read it. And then like a decade later – And in preparation for a presentation, they redid some of the experiment and filmed it. And he shared that on the presentation.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So they're paying a lot of attention to the world and their visual field is really big so they can sort of see what's happening back there. The issue I have with how we raise and keep horses today as an ethologist and sort of looking at how animals live their lives in the wild is that we... keep them in a way that sort of challenges them in several aspects of that.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I don't know if you've seen it, but essentially it's two capuchin monkeys and they're next to one another so they can each see what the other is getting. And they're asked to do a task, like give a... The researcher hands them a rock and they hand it back to the researcher and then they get a reinforcer, so a treat as payment for that behavior. And so the first monkey...
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
gets a piece of cucumber, and he's happy he eats that cucumber. And then the researcher turns towards the second monkey and requests the same behavior, gets the same behavior, and feeds that animal a grape. And capuchins... are not too enthusiastic about cucumbers, but they really love grapes. So when she then turns back to the first monkey again and repeats the behavior and again feeds that one,
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
a cucumber that he was happy to eat like 30 seconds ago. He actually throws a tantrum and throws it back at the researcher, sort of going, I saw that you fed the other guy a grape. And the audience is laughing. So it's like, I think we all recognize that situation that we take a front to somebody else getting paid better for the same quality of work.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Absolutely. I think if the group is doing well, then everybody's better off. So we used to think that there was just sort of individual selection, but there is a certain amount of group selection also. The individual selection is stronger, but certainly if there's a group that collaborates better, that will do better than the group that isn't collaborating as well.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And it's interesting, you've mentioned a few times now the risk of anthropomorphism. And I think that if we look at that as a sort of continuum from anthropomorphism, which we might then define as, you know, thinking that animals are just the same as humans. It's only just that they have some fur, so they're a bit different, but more or less the same.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And on the other side is what we might refer to as anthropo-denial. That was a term coined also by Frans de Waal, the one with the Capuchin experiment. where we don't recognize that, in fact, there are commonalities between humans and other animal species. And I think that we, in our sort of fear of anthropomorphism, we have fallen into anthropo-denial.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So we tend to separate them quite early from their mum, even though in the wild they would stay for a very long time. So I think some of the concerns that I have as an ethologist with how we raise horses is the early weaning that we sometimes see. and also single housing for a species that's an aggregating species. And also that they, in the wild, they will forage up to 16 hours a day.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I think that the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, that we do share lots of commonalities with animals. I think that, for instance...
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
even though our perception of the world might be really different, how we process that information and the types of emotional and mood responses, changes in mood that we get in response to the environment are very much the same, although it will be different stimuli that different animal species pay attention to that are more or less relevant to them, depending on which species it is.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But I think that we've so avoided this topic of anthropomorphism, we've been so afraid of it that we've fallen into the other trap, which is sort of denying that they have anything to do with us.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah. So the common house cat that we have today as a pet evolved as a solitary hunter, but that aggregates in social groups, loose social groups. So they sort of hang out together, but it's not this really... cohesive group and they hunt on their own, so they'll eat on their own also. And me as an ethologist, what I tend to do when I look at an animal species is I look at three things.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I look at their social environment. So typically with cats, I would then say that they, you know, they should, if they are raised well, so they've had the opportunity of spending enough time with mom, typically it should be up to 14 weeks, which I think that we see that in Sweden nowadays. I don't know how it is here in the US, but that seems to be...
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
long enough for the animal to actually learn how to be a cat so that they don't get too emotionally disturbed by the separation once we wean them and sort of put them in a new environment. So just looking at the social bit is one thing that I do, the first thing that I do. The second thing that I do is I look at how do they get food. So again, cats are solitary hunters.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So I would look into ways of, and they, as opposed to dogs, cats typically retain the whole hunting sequence. Sometimes the killing bite isn't quite there, but certainly the grab bite. And the fact that some cats will, if it's an outdoor cat, that they might bring their prey back home is to me, it's not that they want to gift you with their kill, but rather that they feel safe.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So they're simply bringing their prey to a place where they feel safe.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I wouldn't say – I would not call that a gift, no.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Would the cat put them in the shoes or would the mice hide in the shoes?
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I would not assume that they were gifts. No, no. From what I know, cats will sort of bring back what they catch to a place where they feel safe.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And when we bring them into captivity, we typically feed them in the way that promotes very quick eating, you know, for just a fraction of that time. And that can then lead to problem behavior. So for me... I think horses are probably one of the captive animal species where for many individual horses, the type of life that we're offering is really not that great.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Then they often lose interest if it's not moving anymore. Obviously, if your cat or that cat killed the mice, that cat had progressed to the actual killing bite. Many cats don't do that. They only have the grab bite, so they'll just let the... The little rodent go to run off.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah. So they'll let it go. And if the mouse is still, they can actually sort of escape attention because the animal, the cat might grow bored and walk away. But the moment they start moving again, then they're sort of restarting that whole predatory sequence again. But back to your question about how to interact with cats or how to read them.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So that would be the third thing that I'm looking at is how do the animal species in front of me, how do they respond to perceived threat? And I'm saying perceived threat here because sometimes we are well-intended. We're like, hi, and we want to... We want to hug them because we're primates. And they really don't like that. So they will respond to us as if we were a predator.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I think that, again, comes down very much to the types of interaction, social interactions, the type of learning that the...
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
the animal has had when they're really young so for instance there's a study showing that if you handle young kittens between the ages of like two and eight weeks for at least an hour a day and and when i say handle i just mean that sort of interact with them and and play and have them sort of on your lap and so on they will become very social as adults so they will be the type of cat that will jump up into your lap and fall asleep purring
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
If you interact with that young kitten less than like 15 minutes a day, they won't be fearful of humans, but they'll be more like walking up to you and saying hi and then walking away.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
The aloof cat. Yeah. So I think the early life experiences can really shape the type of temperament, if you will, or how sort of vigorously animals respond to changes in the environment.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, I would say that is scent marking.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I would think that it's like something you do in your group. You do mutual scent marking, which means that everybody in the group smells more or less the same. So it's a way of sort of greeting and incorporating the others in the group. So there'll be a lot of scent exchange within this type of species living in a group. That would be my guess as to why they do that.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But that's typically not the – because they have like multiple scent glands in the face. And one of them is used to scent mark sort of the inner territory of the face. And this is where they feel really safe. And then they usually have this urine scent marking, which is in the outskirts of the territory.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And you might see this if, for instance, you have an indoor cat and they start peeing and you bring out a piece of paper and a layout of your territory. your house or apartment, and you start sort of putting a little ring to where you find the pee, that will give you a lot of information. Because if it's a territorial thing, it will typically be at the edges, at the windows or doors.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
If it's an elimination problem that the cat has, sort of maybe perhaps it hurts when he pees. So then he learns to associate pain with going in the box. And so the box starts representing painful experiences. So he'll start going outside of the box. But that type of behavior will be seen in that context instead.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
The covering of waste is a way to sort of reduce the risk of infection. I would assume that they also don't eliminate close to where they eat. So if we have a cat in our house, we shouldn't have the litter box next to the food, which I wish I had known where I had my first cat 20 years ago, because she had that very set up with the food right next to the litter box.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I would also assume that the behavior of dogs when they sort of kick at their poop typically, right, not pee, that it's a way of spreading scent. Because if it were covering scent, the behavior would look very different, I think. But I haven't seen any sort of any scientific study on that topic.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And he's also reading the pee mail from the other dogs in the neighborhood. So the urine tells a lot of information to the other animals. It tells what gender, what reproductive state, perhaps also something about the animal's emotional state or mental state. I wouldn't hesitate to say that that was one of the joys of life for dogs.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
After all, that's how they communicate, and they spend a lot of time doing it, and they're willing to work to get access to that opportunity. So absolutely, I would think that it gives them positive emotional experiences doing that.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Don't really know the answer to that question. But it seems that they domesticated themselves, that it was sort of wolves that started hanging out next to human habitation and that it was sort of the least fearful and the sort of most explorative wolves that dared do this. So it wasn't that we... caught wolves and said, aha, I'm going to breed you now.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But it was rather that it was like a symbiotic relationship that developed over time.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
When we talk about zoos, it's perhaps good to talk about the evolution of zoos because back in the day, like 150 years ago, it used to be more or less a menagerie. Here's a lion and here's an elephant and here's a zebra and they were in little small cages and the only thing that you did was see the animal, really. Zoos today tend to have the purpose of doing a lot of conservation work.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So there's what's referred to as in-situ conservation, where you work to preserve wild habitat and creating national parks, et cetera, and sort of giving the opportunities for reintroduction of species and so on. And there's ex-situ conservation, which is then housing those species animal species that are threatened with extinction in an environment.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And ideally, that environment should then be good enough to promote species typical behavior and so on. So I'm I mean, I'm conflicted. I think that many zoos are sort of doing a lot of good in this effort and also educating the public. And I think that many people who go to zoos, that might awaken in them an interest in animals, which I think is a good thing that we do.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
care about animals, but also that sometimes the housing isn't optimal. And certainly some species are a lot more difficult to keep in captivity compared to others. So polar bears are really difficult to keep because they're ranging carnivores.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
They walk miles and miles and miles, and it's really difficult to provide those species-specific opportunities in captivity compared to other carnivores who have more of a different type of approach to predation.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I think we often don't give animals enough credit. To me, it's not surprising that she experienced something really unpleasant that she came to associate with two individuals and that generated a negative emotional state and aggressive behavior that she then carried out directed towards those two people.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So I think I can't really answer the first part of that question. I don't know the extent to which different dog breeds, their sensory capabilities, how much that differs between different dog breeds. However, how to interact with different dog breeds, I think that's a really interesting question. So during the process of domestication and in just the last couple of hundred years really,
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I would think that a fearful animal might lash out at anyone. But an animal that is angry tends to be more premeditated in a way.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Calculated in a way. So I would expect that if you had scared the tiger, she might show defensive aggression, which is just lashing out at whoever is closest. But this was offensive aggression. And so that is premeditated.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
My guess would be perhaps some sort of displacement behavior that there's motivation to move on in the sequence of behaviors to the next behavior, but it's not quite time yet. And so that sort of activation then gets an outlet through that behavior. But I really don't know. I don't know. I haven't seen this discussed.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I think what all animals are thinking about, where their next meal is going to come from, social interactions, and whether there's any threat anywhere.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I would say that... If the animal doesn't feel safe, then it's very hard to engage the animal in any type of sort of view. If an animal is fearful, you try to feed them. They often won't take food, for instance. So the sense of safety has a very high priority because if you don't feel safe, you could die, essentially.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
we started selecting for different capabilities in the different dogs that we needed for different tasks, essentially. So if we look at a wolf hunting sequence, what they'll do is they'll do an orient response where they sniff and they're sort of looking for a prey. And then they will do some eyeing and stalking behavior. So they'll focus and they'll do stalking and then they'll do chasing.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So if you're in a situation where you don't feel safe, it's because that situation is potentially dangerous. There could be predators around, and then you must focus your attention on those predators because otherwise you're going to die. And that, of course, depends on the species. Some species are sort of aggregate in big flocks, if we're talking birds, and some are pair bonding species.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But the social environment is really important, both with regards to, you know, parenting behavior. So sexual behavior, parenting behavior, raising young and so on. All of that also has high priority because it's essentially about furthering your genes into the next generation. And then foraging behaviors. Where am I going to get my next meal? We feed them on a plate.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
We think that we're doing them a service. Like, here's your food on the plate. You don't have to do anything. But they come equipped to actually show their food-getting repertoire of behaviors. So typically, if we don't allow them to show those behaviors, we might see some problem behaviors popping up instead because they will redirect that energy, that intention. I don't know.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Did you have any problems with the animals, sort of the birds, you know, ripping your carpet? Oh, they destroyed everything.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Like the foraging behavior directed towards the wrong thing.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Essentially, I think that for dog owners, that what we can do is we can try to promote the different aspects of the predatory sequence that that particular dog in front of us enjoys doing. I mentioned nose work as being one of the things that many dogs really enjoy.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And interestingly, and this is just sort of the early days of scientific studies on the effects of nose work are really promising that one of the effects of nose work seems to be. So if you're not familiar with it, it's essentially that the animal has learned that he needs to find a specific scent. in an area.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And so he sniffs the area, he roams the area and he follows the scent and he'll stop and mark when he finds the scent. And then he gets a reinforcer. So he gets rewarded for doing that. So that's essentially more or less a setup. And it seems that it helps regulate arousal so that animals who are sort of highly strung and almost have generalized anxiety get calmed down.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And the ones that are sort of semi-depressed... get sort of more enthusiastic about life. And also, if we're back in core effect space again, we have this shift to the right-hand side of the core effect space. So we have positive valence associated with that. And it seems really interesting. Early days still, because this dog sport is like just, I don't know, 15 years old or something.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
It's not very old. So essentially what we can do is we can, every dog could do nose work. I think that would be an interesting sort of an outlet for that very first part of the behavior sequence. And then I know that some trainers are working specifically to help dogs who chase wildlife, for instance.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And then they'll do a grab bite, a killing bite. Then they'll dissect and then they'll eat the prey. So we have this whole predatory sequence that we see in wolves. And what happened during the process of domestication was that we sort of selected for certain aspects of that sequence in different breeds. So we'll have the sniffers, the hounds that are really great.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And it's about teaching the dog to stay in the first parts of the predatory sequence, to do the sniffing, the pointing and the eyeing behavior. And they're getting reinforced for that so many times so that it becomes like a feedback loop that they see a deer running across the road and they go, mom, I saw a deer and they get reinforced for that.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And other dogs like greyhounds love chasing, that you allow them to do that. And then other dogs that really enjoy carrying things, that you allow them to do that. And then give your poodle something to rip apart. Is that what poodles like to do? Disembowel things, yeah.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, as far as I understand, yes.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And then also I would, you know, rather than serving food on the plate, you might try scatter feeding. So just or feeding it in a way that the animal actually has to work for it. So do some behavior like one of these snuffle mats, you hide the food in there. So they have to actually spend some time looking for the food before consuming it.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Because otherwise, if you serve it in a bowl, some animals, you know, they inhale it. It takes like 30 seconds and they're done.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So sometimes it can be hard to know where your dog is on that scale, especially if it's like a mixed breed of some type. And then you can often actually just look at the conformation of the dog. So those very lean... I'm thinking greyhound now. The lean dog with not much muscle and very pointy snout tends to be the chasers. And the ones with more muscles...
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Front muscles and bigger jaws tend to be the ones that rip things apart.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I guess maybe that answers your first question. I think that probably all dog breeds enjoy sniffing. It's one of the big things that people are exploring a lot now is nose work. But anyway, back to this process of domestication. And then we had the pointers who we have really selected for that behavior. In the litter of puppies, we would select the one that was the most...
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
space to roam but you have to walk them but they don't need long walks compared to like a little terrier sometimes needs to just go go go go go i mean needs two hours or more of activity i think you need to pay a lot of attention to the type of life that you're going to offer whether it's you know living in an apartment in a busy city or whether it's uh you know you're on a farm somewhere which which breed of dog is going to adapt best to that lifestyle do you think dogs like cities
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I think many dogs get very stressed in cities because of the constant bombardment of sensory information. So there's noise. There's dogs. So if you're out walking on the street, there's constantly meeting strangers. And for many animal species, meeting strangers, A, doesn't happen very often, and B, causes an increase in arousal because it could be, you know, friend or foe.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
It could be someone that you want to fight with. It could be someone you want to have sex with. You need to assess the situation. And I think that dogs are quite unique in that respect in that they have a high tolerance for strangers because many other animal species do not have And I think that we tend to forget that sometimes that we introduce animals to animals that they don't know.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
We expect them to get along and they don't. That type of introduction needs to be done really carefully. Typically, we might start with just exchanging scents. So if you're If you have one cat and want to get a second cat, for instance, they typically won't just accept the other the way that two dogs might do, for instance.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So then you might have them in different rooms and you might rub one cat with one towel and rub the other cat with another towel and then exchange towels. And then you might want to gradually incorporate other sensory modalities too so that they'll start hearing each other and finally that they start seeing each other. And then at the end, the tactile, so the actual physical contact.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And if you do it that way, you reduce the risk that they'll actually start fighting when you do the introduction. Because if you just put them together, they might just escalate to aggression right away. But if you do it gradually... they, that exchange of information will help them sort of figure out who the other is and reduce the risk of aggression.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
For most species. There's actually a few exceptions being... What comes to mind is certain waterfowl birds where... Female, and I can't say which species now, but some species of water bird. The female recognizes the male innately, but the male learns through sexual imprinting when they're young to sort of be attracted to females that resemble the female that reared them.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And essentially this is because in those species, the males are typically very ornamented and sort of really fabulous looking. And the females are cryptic. They're like camouflaged. So they're like brown. So the males need to learn what mom looks like. And when they grow up, they'll start courting. that look like mum.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And so if you raise such a male with the wrong species, they'll start courting the wrong female. And of course she won't be interested because he doesn't look like her golden standard of what a male of that species is supposed to look like.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
prone to do that behavior. And so over generations, we really sculpted that niche, so to speak. So a pointer will typically not proceed to the next behavior, the predatory sequence. And then we have like the border collies who might do some chasing or some eyeing and stalking and a little bit of chase, but ideally no grabbing. And we have the pure chasers, the greyhounds, for instance.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So there's something really powerful there. There's inbreeding avoidance. It's sort of a mechanism that prevents many animal species from mating with someone who's too genetically similar to yourself since we get this inbreeding depression. But there's also sort of don't waste your time mating with someone that you can't even produce offspring with.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
However, one other exception that came to mind was ungulates. Sometimes, and I have this memory of being, I was in Africa back in 1995 at the Chimfunji Wildlife Orphanage, walking chimps into the forest to sort of rehabilitate them and
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And they had a young duiker there, which is a very small, like, yay high antelope kind of thing, who had been orphaned and raised, bottle raised and sexually imprinted on humans. So he came up and started, you know, humping me, more or less thinking that I was his kind.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So that type of sexual imprinting is when predominantly, I think, males learn they imprint sexually on the type of individual that raised them. So that's the type of individual that they will then later also try to court. Yeah.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
I think Conrad Lawrence had also in his, one of his books, he described some sort of corvid species who he also raised from young and who started courting his, I don't know,
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
secretary or someone and the interesting story there was the courting behavior in this bird is vomiting you know leaving like a present and offering food in any open surface or orifice so he would try to sort of get her to open her mouth and when she didn't he would go and leave the present in her ear instead
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So that's the other type of imprinting you're talking about. That's filial imprinting. So there are two types. There's the sexual imprinting where you learn who to mate with. And there's the filial imprinting where you sort of learn who to feel safe with. And they start following that individual.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Actually... I would say that dogs don't imprint on humans. They grow attachment bonds to humans.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So imprinting is typically a very fast process. It occurs within minutes or hours. Attachment takes longer and involves more senses. So imprinting tends to be, I think, visual. If I'm not mistaken. Perhaps olfactory in some species. And attachment has previously mostly been studied in humans. Yes. So this bond that grows between caregiver and offspring.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
What's interesting also is that attachment bond will grow in different ways depending on how the caregiver responds to the young ones. needs essentially so you can have a secure attachment bond where the caregiver is very reliably responds to the needs of the young one so that if they find themselves alone
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
they can self-regulate better, so their nervous system can more easily calm down again after a stressor than if they are insecurely attached. And so it seems that dogs form, rather than imprinting on humans, they form a type of attachment bond, and they can also be securely or insecurely attached to their persons.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And then we have the grabbers, the retrievers. And then we have the killers, the terriers.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And also how they respond to a stranger.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, yeah. Or clingy also. Yeah. So the same types of experiments have been done on dogs. And it's been found that certain dogs are sort of insecurely attached. They'll be clingy or avoidant and some are securely attached. So they'll be sort of more explorative. They'll recover quicker from the separation.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah. Sadly, I think that, and I'm not sure that I have any backup in any scientific studies here, but I suspect at least that probably early weaning predisposed dogs to insecure attachment.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, as an ethologist, sort of looking at how the species live in the wild, what type of social interactions they have, and how can we best provide an environment to sort of promote natural behavior. For me, eight weeks is way too early. So we have some studies from the, I don't know, 60s or something.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
where I think two researchers called Scott and Fuller did some separation studies, but that was with dogs aged like three, four, five, six weeks. And they found that that type of early separation was really detrimental.
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But as far as I know, there's been very few studies done beyond eight weeks. And of course, many people would then say that, okay, well, we have to do all that socialization stuff where the animal learns to sort of accept life with humans. That would then have to occur at the breeders rather than in the new environment.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
They were bred to exterminate small rodents and stuff.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But actually, I'm not so sure because it seems that if you have secure attachment... you're better able to self-regulate after being exposed to something that will dysregulate you. So you have an event happening, you get anxious and sort of fearful, and then your nervous system... is able to calm down again.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And so I think that if we are, if we simply allow dogs to have secure attachment, then perhaps the need for this, sometimes this socialization procedures are very elaborate.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
There's like a list of a hundred things that the dog needs to be exposed to, you know, men with beards and children age 12 and people with shoes, you know, certain types of shoes and, you know, the vacuum cleaner and so on and so on. There's a whole list of things that you need to expose an animal to. And I would think that if the animal is
Huberman Lab
What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
is securely attached so that they have learned self regulation, being exposed to those things will not be such a big deal. But I don't think that we have the research to back up that assertion quite yet.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And that also occurs during adolescence.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So we systematically intentionally bred for that like a couple hundred years ago. And then we have the ones that don't show much of the predatory sequence at all, that simply mostly just eat, which are the, what do you call them, the ones that help livestock guardians. They still like the sniffing.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
You're touching on several different things that I think are interesting. One, that it's very much a cultural phenomenon. That in Norway, I know that you're not allowed to neuter dogs unless for medical reasons. Really? Yeah. And in Western Australia, you're not allowed not to neuter dogs unless for medical reasons or if you want to breed them.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So it's like very cultural whether neutering is something that you do or not in any given location. That's one. The second thing is that you said that neutering is about removing testicles. Actually, there's other procedures that can be done, which is essentially just snipping the connection. So not removing testicles so that they continue producing all the...
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
stuff that they produce, but they can't reproduce sexually.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, so vasectomies, and for females, the corresponding procedure would then be to sort of Whatever it is.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
There's also a third option, which is chemical castration. That's reversible. But you can try to see what behavioral effects you get from a change of hormonal status. There's also this interesting thing that the knowledge of the effects of castration or of neutering has really changed a lot in the last 20 years or so.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
It used to be in the 1990s that it used to be recommended because, you know, they wouldn't reproduce and there'd be less humping. And so it was sort of promoted online. with regards to certain behavioral changes.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Later studies have shown, and there's like more than 20 in the last 20 years or so, have shown that quite consistently that some of the effects of neutering might be particularly in males, apparently. And it depends on the age at which this is done also. And it has to do with the activation process, of course. is that you see an increase in fear, an increase in reactivity, aggressive behavior.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
You might see an increase in noise sensitivity and so on. So it seems that, as you were touching on, the change in hormonal status not only has this physiological, the physical effects on the body, but also behavioral effects. Now, there's also... an increase in the risk of certain cancers or certain physical problems and a decrease in others.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So I would suggest that once you do get your next dog, that you discuss with a veterinarian the best option for that particular breed and that particular individual because it's going to be very breed-specific, it's gender-specific, and it's also the age at which these procedures are done.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Yeah, I think it's 40% of Americans own a dog. And I think in Norway, it's like 15. So, and I think probably this ties in a lot to why the cultures have emerged so differently, because... There's a lot less sort of backyard breeding and so on and feral populations in Scandinavia of dogs. So we don't have this huge problem with overpopulation that you'll see in some other countries.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So they tend to retain the sniffing part and then specific breeds will have one or perhaps a few of the behaviors from the hunting sequence. So I think if we want to offer dogs a good life, we should understand where they are on that scale. And also that the working dogs come sort of with this evolutionary backpack, their genetic backpack will encourage them to really want to do that work.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I think that here a lot of the neutering is done to control the population predominantly as a way to sort of try to reduce the number of animals that go into shelters and so on.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
One thing that leaps to mind is the extent to which cultural learning occurs in humans. For other animal species, they learn from, you know, trial and error. If I do this, that happens. First that happens, then that other thing happens. So classical conditioning and operant conditioning tie into sort of forming the animal's behavior. They also have social learning.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
They watch someone else and look at what they do. In this situation, I'm feeling a bit disconcerted watching you to see how you react. Oh, you don't seem to be that upset. Okay, I guess I don't have to be that either. Or you're interacting with that thing in that way. I guess I'll do the same.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
But it's like the influence is from the animals that are closest to you and from your own personal experience. And we sort of stand on the shoulders of giants, we humans, because we can read people's thoughts that are thousands of years old, literally.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And so I think that's one of the biggest differences, I think, in our learning is that we used to be called man the toolmaker, as if toolmaking would be the thing that set us apart from other animals, until Jane Goodall reported that she'd seen chimpanzees.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Making tools to, you know, the termite fishing behavior that she saw where they would break off a twig and take all the leaves off and then sharpen it so that they could insert it into a termite mound. And the termites would climb onto it and they could carefully extract it and eat the termites. So they made these tools.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
So, yeah, that would be, I guess, my first spontaneous reflection to your question.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And I mean, knowledge is always shifting. So some of the things that we've been discussing today and that I've said with great conviction might be proven completely false a year from now. So that's I think the interesting thing about science is that we're always having to question our assumptions.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
Thank you for having me. It's been a great discussion, I think. Thank you so much. Thank you.
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What Pets Actually Want & Need | Dr. Karolina Westlund
And then we have also the sort of, I think they're sometimes referred to as toy breeds, the ones that are lap dogs who are not that interested in any of that working dog behavior. So I think it's, we need to, with regards to the different breeds, we need to really understand what purpose they were bred for, I think.