Ologies with Alie Ward
Ethnocynology (HUMANS & DOGS THROUGH TIME) with David Ian Howe
Wed, 15 Jan 2025
Ancient dogs! Domestic wolves! Anthropology! Archaeology! It’s all Ethnocynology: when humans and dogs started living and working together. The wonderful and iconic David Ian Howe is an educator and professional archaeologist whose focus is canines and people. So let’s curl up and be cute – like dogs – as we listen about breed histories, what evidence we have for doggies being friends, how wolves tamed themselves, why our relationships with canines make us what we are, talking dogs, if it’s fair it ask your dog to love you back, corn paws, and why your dog is trying to make fetch happen. Visit David’s website and his podcasts, The David Ian Howe Show & Ethnocynology with David Ian HoweFollow David on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Patreon and BlueskyA donation went to the Native American Humane SocietyMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Lupinology (WOLVES), Canine Speech Pathology (DOGS WITH BUTTONS), Felinology (CATS), Experimental Archaeology (ATLATLS), Momiology (MUMMIFICATION), Egyptology (ANCIENT EGYPT), Classical Archaeology (ANCIENT ROME), Mythology (STORYTELLING), Indigenous Cuisinology (NATIVE COOKING), Radiology (X-RAY VISION), Delphinology (DOLPHINS), Functional Morphology (ANATOMY), Zymology (BEER & YEAST), Columbidology (PIGEONS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jacob ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn
Oh, hey, it's that festival bracelet you're still wearing on Monday. Allie Ward, let's talk dogs. So in the past, we've done episodes on dogs and wolves, but this one explains why a wolf is your dog. It's anthropology, it's sinology, it's lupinology, it's ethnocinology, which is a term coined in 2002 by an anthropologist named Brian Cummings.
In this book, he wrote titled, First Nations, First Dogs, Canadian Aboriginal Ethnocinology. And ethnocinology is the study of dogs within their cultural context. I love it. So for years, y'all have asked me to interview this particular guest. I have been tagged in so many things. And also recommended by our experimental archaeology guest, Angelo Robledo.
So this guest's handles everywhere are ethnocinology. I was game. So they did their undergrad in anthropology at University of Tennessee at Knoxville and got a master's in anthropology at the University of Wyoming. They are an educator with huge platforms on TikTok and YouTube. And they are also a professional archaeologist. And we talk about how wolves went from the woods to your bed.
And we'll get to that. But first, thank you to Patreon folks at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show for as little as a dollar a month. and submitting your questions for the ologists before we record. We also, by the way, have a show called Smologies. Those are kid-safe and classroom-friendly episodes. You can find Smologies wherever you get podcasts.
Just search for it, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Also, thanks to everyone leaving reviews, which help the show so much. I read them all and then I read you one each week, such as this one from Momstress1 who wrote, Thank you for illuminating so many fascinating topics. Even those that seem mundane at first are revealed to be deeply connected to the web of life. Momstress1, the name. I love it.
And thanks to everyone who left reviews. Let's talk dogs. Enough about me. Okay, let's curl up.
and be cute as we listen about breeds of dogs, what anthropological evidence we have for doggies being our friends, how wolves domesticated themselves, why our relationships with canines make us what we are, and if it's fair to ask your dog to love you back, we talk corn, paws, and why your dog is trying to make fetch happen with archaeologist, anthropologist, and ethnocynologist David Ian Howe.
My name is David Ian Howe. He, him.
And ethnosynology. We have both been tagged in so many, so many posts to talk to each other.
Yeah, it's exciting. It's definitely an ology. I guess technically ethnocynology falls under umbrella of anthropology to me. But I was just so into dogs and I did a whole bunch of research and all my term papers were on dogs. And I was looking to see like, is there a specific study of dogs in human context?
So it's not like something you can major in, but it technically is the Greek word for what I'm talking about.
When it came to finding mentors or professors, did you have to seek out ones that were not cat people or particularly had an interest in ushering you through this?
Yeah. I went to school for hunter-gatherer archaeology, and I studied stone tools mainly as my thesis. And I wanted to go get my PhD for this specifically, but there's no school that has a specific... We studied dog archaeology program, you know, and that's difficult.
And now that you have done this, are there other people who message and write you all the time asking how they can also get involved in the field?
Constantly.
Yeah, that's what I figured.
Yeah. Or like, where do you teach? How do I be a student? And I was like, I don't, but I will say Dr. Angela Perry is a archeologist and she does a lot of this dog archeology and she's like a wizard with that and can do all the genetic aspects and a lot of stuff that she publishes is like kind of what people would like want to read.
So Dr. Angela Perry is a zooarchaeologist and has authored papers such as Dietary Variation Among Indigenous Nicaraguan Horticulturists and Their Dogs, an Ethnoarchaeological Application of the Canine Surrogacy Approach. Just in case you're up for some light reading. Dr. Perry is kind of the goat of canine studies.
Now, David has also authored papers such as Dogs in Native American Culture, An Ecological and Ontological Approach, and On the Origin of Our Favorite Subspecies, The Biological Implications of Dog Domestication on Modern Humans. And he told me that his grad school courses involved biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology.
But despite those variations...
All of my term papers in those classes were focused on dogs. But doing that, looking for dogs that live around humans, you can also study all of those subjects equally with dogs. And just I found so much information. It was overwhelming.
Really?
Yeah.
Where was that information? Was it notes from people's digs? Was it like oral traditions passed down? Where did you find that?
Yeah, a lot of digs. You can find specific sites that have dogs at it. But what really intrigued me was reading old ethnographies from either the French or the Spanish or the English when they got here. Or just the Bureau of Ethnology went out in the early 1900s just documenting whatever was left of indigenous cultures. And there's a wealth of information in there because...
Without the horse or cows or, you know, any other animals, the dog was crucial to life for Indigenous Americans here. And just so much. And every culture kind of has dogs or something that they do, or at least they live there.
When did they go from a wolf to a dog?
Debated topic. Very debated. Let's break it down. But I would say humans leave Africa, we get to Eurasia, specifically Siberia, and you're interacting with wolves who are an equally social and intelligent predator. So you're going to be running into each other. They both hunt caribou a lot, especially in that area.
So humans and wolves are like, hey, man, what's up? Like if you saw the same dude at the gym all the time. But if the leg press at Planet Fitness was a bloody reindeer in Siberia.
And I would say that whole time, like the domestication process is happening. But we can see like the dog as we genetically know it today appears 20,000 years ago in East Asia, Siberia.
When was it a dog world? When did pretty much every continent have dogs and humans working together?
I guess two answers to that. In that East Asia, Siberia area where people are... you know, domesticating dogs, or you could say wolves are self-domesticating around hominid camps. People then go to the Americas, either across the land bridge or down the coast, whatever theory you subscribe to.
And that's how dogs ended up in the Americas and the only like domestic animal there until turkeys and llamas later. But the rest of the world, you can see dogs are traded kind of like a commodity and you can see dog genetic lines being traded across Eurasia into Africa.
And to answer the question fully, I would say like the Neolithic, when we go from hunting and gathering to that more sedentary lifestyle with a bigger population, dogs just kind of boom around then.
What niche did dogs fill for humans that made them such successful companions and tools for people?
And there's so much I could answer there.
I essentially just asked him about his entire field of study because I'm the worst. It's his fault he has a cool job.
Dogs eating, or I could say early dogs, wolves eating scraps around human camps would help deter predators in itself. Wolves don't necessarily bark. Non-domestic wolves don't bark, but once dogs started barking, we were breeding for that. They would alert for different predators.
Every time my daughter, Grammy, does boof, boof, boof, when we get a delivery, she's fulfilling the pact of her ancestors.
But certainly hunting, that's probably the first thing. Because we were probably finding wolves hunting and then just stealing their kill. Or vice versa, the wolves would try to steal a human kill. But that interaction was happening. But yeah, hunting, sentinels, like garden camps. And then, especially in the Americas, we know dogs were being used to help pull loads before the horse.
They would wear little backpacks to help collect shellfish and berries and all that. And... In some areas, they were used for their wool or their fur, I should say. And then this one's always kind of dicey, but just until like, you know, 1980, dogs are kind of just eaten all over the world as a food source, usually out of like a ceremonial purpose.
What types of ceremonies? I know the line between food and friend is so long. It's so cultural. It's so regional. It's also temporal. It's odd that we eat pigs, but we can think of eating dogs.
Right.
It's confusing to me how confusing it is. And I'm not a vegan or a vegetarian, but it is still super confusing to me. So what types of ceremonies were they revered enough to be like a sacrifice or how did that work?
Yeah, there's cultures where like there's endocannibalism where like you eat people within your group or exocannibalism is eating people outside of your group. But when you're eating within your group, it's kind of you can imagine like You want that person to be part of you kind of thing. And that's something that happens in different tribal cultures.
And I imagine that's probably what happened with dogs. Because a lot of dogs are... Archaeologically, when you find they were kind of in their prime, maybe a little older. So maybe they were a good hunting dog and they were eaten in that sense. Can't tell exactly if all of them are eaten. It's like only if the cut marks show up on the bones. But...
I know in definitely indigenous cultures, some puppies are eaten, or I think in Mexico culture, for sure, dogs were eaten out of respect for their sacrifice for people and things like that.
Trust me, you will not enjoy this aside, but for quick factual context, a University of Minnesota article titled Cultural Awareness for Veterinary Clinicians notes that the practice of eating dogs is found in many Asian countries, including the Philippines, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand. And while the practice is not nearly as prevalent as it once was.
The paper says it does continue, and in general, this consumption is seasonal, with most dog meat being consumed in the winter. Now, you might say, why does that ick me out so much? So in a 2010 book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, author Melanie Joy notes that meat-eating typically involves one or more of the three Ns of carnism. It's normal, it's natural, or it's necessary.
And researchers have found that meat eating is trending upwards in India, which is typically more vegetarian.
And a 2022 paper out of the University of Technology in Sydney titled Exploring Meat Eating Practices in Mumbai and Sydney with a View Towards Encouraging a Reduced Meat Diet notes that although meat consumption in India is relatively low, it's rising in response to growing levels of urbanization, and increasing disposable incomes and exposure to new global norms.
So when the norms change, obviously cultural practices do too and vice versa. Now on the topic of Australia, that country has one of the highest levels of meat consumption across the board, which was news to me. I didn't know that. I just hear that y'all have great coffee there.
Now a 2021 paper titled The Evolution of Urban Australian Meat Eating Practices reports that despite these really carnivorous leanings Australia, 20% of folks identify as aspiring meat reducers. So what's going on there?
It explains that changing discourses of masculinity and the move toward embracing more fluid representations of gender have in turn changed meanings of the meat-eating man and a meat-heavy diet. So it's important to remember that our relationships to certain animals are highly cultural and And they change over time. They're changing all the time. What you eat is weird and gross to someone else.
I guarantee every single one of us. And when you're going through the research and looking at remains of dogs and burials of dogs, perhaps, when did they start to really branch off with different breeds? Because a Shih Tzu, so different from a Malamute, obviously, they're all the same species, which is...
boggling to me yeah you know they're kind of i've said before that they were kind of like apps for people it's like you need a weasel sniffer you get this kind you need a yeah some could pull your stuff you get this kind but when did they start branching off into such specialized breeds i like that you said app because something that is in the literature a lot and this is something dr perry talks about is dogs are a biotechnology
Yep. As we have mentioned in a previous episode, stubby-legged doxies used to charge into badger holes, and they were so good at that. Yorkies were bred to be tiny and to accompany miners in small places so they could eat the rats. Poodles were bog dogs. They were good at navigating the water to pick up hunters' dead ducks.
And even the queen's corgis once had the job of herding geese, hence they are very short. So today we rely on apps and robots to do things for us. But back then it was like, I need an animal with a gangly face and no tail and bowed arms for the purpose of finding and biting the village witches. And they were like, cool, here you go. We bred a new dog for that.
Dogs are the world's most lovable tools.
I would study stone tools or things like that or projectile weapons and stuff, but dogs are such a versatile tool. You can literally code by breeding them to do different tasks. Wow. Yeah, I find that so cool. The early tasks of hunting and guarding and stuff like that, but then if you think about... Salukis or greyhounds are meant for speed and racing, and then dachshunds burrow into stuff.
Huskies are a lot bigger to pull sleds and have that load-bearing. And then there's livestock guardian dogs, which are bigger than wolves because they have to fight wolves. That would appear, to my knowledge, after the Neolithic. There's a lot of that. After 10,000 years of them being around, you'll start seeing more...
Diverse breeds, though the standard dog probably would have looked like a dingo-like thing with that standard yellow coat. Not a wolf, but not a dog. If you think of ancient Mexico, they had the Chihuahua, the Shillet's Quintly, all sorts of different dogs. But the modern breeds we have is definitely like a Victorian era thing where they became a status symbol.
The wealthy could have very specific dogs. And even in Rome, if you were a wealthy Roman citizen, you could import a fancy Egyptian greyhound and show it off. Even back then.
It's like the French Bulldogs of the ancient times.
Yeah, like specific niche breeds.
What's something that when you were studying, you were really baffled or boggled by? Was there any moment that really shocked and surprised you?
Two things from the anthropological, like zoological perspective. Are dogs more beneficial to humans than not? Do you need to waste extra calories feeding the dogs or do they help you get more calories like in a hunter-gatherer setting than you would without them? That kind of varies depending on where you're at in the world and that's debated.
But that was interesting to me to see how different that can be.
Your dog eats a sock and you're looking at like two grand. Grammy needed two teeth pulled and it cost more than replacing a crown on my own human molar. But there's no price tag on the soul of a precious angel. Also, if you have working dogs like service dogs or sheep herding ones or witch nibblers, they don't even get a real paycheck.
And a lot of experts agree that this is because they can't unionize because the majority of dogs are bad at computers.
But mainly through the anthropology, like cultural aspect, just seeing the sheer amount of creation stories and mythologies and oral traditions of different cultures in which dogs play a role in creation. or are there present in creation or have to do with the afterlife. Yeah, like Anubis in Egyptian mythology, when you die, he's the first one that meets you and he kind of greets you before.
He's like your chaperone to get to the rest of the gods in the underworld. And he holds that scale. A dog is judging your soul, like were you a good person or a bad person, which I find great. And then of course, the three-headed dog in Greek mythology, he keeps people in and out of the underworld, he guards it.
And in Mexico mythology, like a dog waits for you across the river in the first land of the dead, and then it will help you like navigate you through the lands of the dead so you don't have to do it alone.
Like the way they watch from a window for you to come home from work, except in a river of hell being like, you made it.
And that's very common, like different versions of that myth, especially in the Americas.
Do you think that that's anthropological evidence that all dogs do go to heaven?
Yeah, I would think so. It was so fascinating to me that dogs are just so intrinsic to human life and so symbiotic that it's not even a question. They're just part of the stories. In the Egyptian sense, I read a paper trying to figure this out, and jackals like to scavenge tombs and graves and things like that.
And in the Bible, it always says they were fed to the dogs or left them for the dogs or left them for the wolves. They always scavenge death and like dogs came to be because they were scavenging bones around our camp. So it makes sense that we would associate them with some kind of like, it's called a psychopomp, like something that guides you to the afterlife.
Dogs are so crucial to human nature and culture now that it would make sense that if there was some kind of afterlife, dogs are there.
Yeah. What about flim flam that we feel like we hear a lot? I don't know if it needs debunking, but like true or false, the whites of the eyes of a dog help us communicate with them, their eyebrow muscles. Did we breed them or did they get selected to have more facial expressions that we could understand?
Yeah. Obviously, chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest relatives in terms of genetics, but wolves are so socially intelligent. They show their teeth, they roll over, they wag their tail, they have different barks, and they're monogamous to an extent. Close enough. So early humans would have noticed that. and probably felt some kind of kinship with the wolf in that sense.
But over time, the reason we could interact with each other so well was because we're so social and dogs would have picked up on our social cues with their eyes and stuff as well. If you think of a pug, it's basically bred to look like a human face. It's flat and they have the big eyes. So over time, it became advantageous for dogs to understand our eye movements and like it was bred for.
on its own as a side effect of being heavily bred to be around people.
But for dogs who are working and going back to their wolfy roots, helping humans hunt, David says.
And a common theme I've noticed is that While a human is hunting, you and I could see a deer if it's against the wind. And we'll see it before your dog sees it. But if we don't see the deer and it's on the wind, a dog will either hear it or smell it first. So you can notice your dog perk up before you see something. And it's... We both complement each other's senses.
Like our sight is obviously much better as primates, but their scent and hearing is just exponentially better than ours. So with that in mind and just how social we are, I would imagine if they don't already understand pointing now, it's something that, you know, it's on the way there.
What about bonding with a dog? When did it become not just like a work relationship, but an emotional bond like that? Or how are dogs different from other animals where it might be that really close emotional bond?
In the chemical sense, dogs can share. They release oxytocin, and we do as well when we pet them or when we interact. I can look at my dog right now and make that stupid sound. That's just your brain doing that because you... look at it like a baby or an infant. And that's that, you know, primate desire to care for that thing.
But in terms of like in history, the first dog burial that is like known is one in Germany at a place called bone over castle. And it's two humans and a dog buried together. And that would be not to say that's the first one, which is the first one we know of. But to me, it's like humans for a long time, aren't burying each other. until like roughly tens of thousands years ago, 100,000 years ago.
So when you start burying people, it's that idea of like, we're human, there's probably something after or whatever. And like, let's bury this person with culture and reverence. And like, that's a huge milestone in human history. When you're taking that idea and then passing it on to a non-human animal, that's like another step in human history. And the dog is the first one we do that with.
How did you get your dog?
From a trailer park. Really? Yeah, I wanted a German Shepherd. I've always wanted a German Shepherd like that. I'd rather give it a good life, and I can, so I did. He is definitely... I've had a beagle and I've had a lab. He is like a domestic wolf more so than my other animals were. I used to think it was elitist when German shepherd people were like, you just don't understand the shepherd bond.
And now I fully get it. It's a different creature. Yeah.
Well, how is it different? How is it more like a domestic wolf?
He's so intelligent and smart and I can see him thinking and he'll like trick me sometimes until like I don't want him to get his bone or bring it outside because he'll, you know, bury it and come back in full of dirt. But like he'll hide it in his mouth a specific way or run back in the door to get it before I can let him out. But mainly my other animals or dogs always wanted to be pet.
They like loved it and like constantly on you. He's very autonomous and he only wants to be pet when he wants to be pet. But another thing too is that when I'm hiking or skiing, he like will run to the front of the group and then run to the back of the group and just patrol and kind of search. And at night, I really want to map this out and do some data on it because it's so fascinating.
But he'll find different spots in the house to sleep at night to get different views of each exit, but also I'm still in view. And my beagle didn't do that. She just slept in bed and snored. But he's just working. It's just so different.
Are there any soapboxes that your work makes you want to get on in terms of how we think of dogs or how we interact with them?
No one's ever asked me that. It's a good question. So dogs are like a remnant artifact of the Ice Age to me. We still have from that time. We don't use stone tools so much anymore. We don't have to sell our hides and live in caves. But whether you grew up in Hong Kong in a high rise and have never gone to the forest, New York City... Central Park's all you got, things like that.
Or if you're like me here in Wyoming and I'm out in the woods with my dog and I can see if he hears something or he alerts me, we all share that piece of nature and dogs are just an artifact of our past that we still keep with us every day that hasn't changed.
Well, I mean, it's changed very much in terms of chihuahuas and wolves, but there's still a living, breathing predator that hangs out in our house with us and One other caveat with that, too, is if an alien came to the planet and just saw Coco the gorilla speak to a fox, and then the fox took out Osama bin Laden, it's such an absurd thing to think about. That sucks.
We actually did an episode with speech pathologist and the founder of the dogs talking through buttons movement, Christina Hunger. Her social media account is Hunger for Words. I'm sure you've seen her dog Stella pressing buttons. And people tend to be divided.
on this they're either like oh sweet lord baby jesus my dog can talk this is the best or they're like this is garbage i hate what the world is doing new research came out a few months ago from a uc san diego paper titled how do soundboard trained dogs respond to human button presses and investigation into word comprehension which gives us an answer You ready?
It found that, yes, dogs produced contextually appropriate behaviors for both play-related and outside-related words, and that pet dogs can be successfully taught by their owners to associate words recorded onto soundboard buttons to outcomes in the real world. So, yeah, they're really talking through those, in a sense. Now, can a doodle have an existential crisis while staring into a mirror?
Did you just say poo this and then look in the mirror?
We don't fully know that. But in the future, we might be reeling that we ever questioned their ability to be dismayed at the state of the world like we are sometimes. So be nice to dogs. Be nice to animals that have feelings. And maybe one day, you know, via like a gentle brain implant, your dog will be able to cuss you out like a teenager.
But yeah, it's fascinating. And I know my dog thinks and I know he like they can understand syntax in a sense. And like, want to go pee pee is like, it's like, yeah, he gets that. It's like several words, but he probably just hears pee pee.
We have really great questions from listeners. And I wanted to barrage you with them. Is that cool?
Yeah.
By the way, this is fun. I'm so glad to hear. We honestly have had you on the list forever.
So happy to have him. Also happy to donate of a cause of his selection. And David chose the wonderful NativeAmericanHumane.org, which is led by and with Native Americans. And the org explains, as Native Americans, we have shared special relationships with dogs for millennia, celebrating them in our stories, songs, and traditions, and
And by helping tribal families access veterinary services, NativeAmericanHumane.org helps people and animals live together in health and safety. And a donation was made to them in honor of David and thanks to funding from sponsors of the show. All right, patrons, let's ask your questions. You can submit yours before we record via patreon.com slash ologies. It costs a buck a month to join. Low bar.
Big love. All right.
So, okay, I'm just going to dive in here. Valerie asked, I wonder if there is evidence for human-dog interaction in all habitable regions. My name is Valerie Vanderlip, and I'm in Louisville, Kentucky. Is there evidence for dog-human interaction, or are there some places where they didn't really do dogs?
Yeah. Higher latitudes. Obviously, there's a lot more dog and human interaction because of wolves being there, especially like in northern Asia, East Asia, Europe, and then the Basenji in Africa and all that.
Okay, so where wolves live, dogs are going to evolve first or they become domesticated and bred first.
But one thing I did learn that kind of interested me was dogs don't do well in the tropics, at least back in the day. So when the Americas were being peopled by the earliest Americans going down through the tropics of Mexico and Nicaragua and all that, the dog population kind of just stops for a while. And the Inca at some point eventually have dogs.
In Southeast Asia and in Central America, there's a bottleneck of less dogs because they just don't do well in the tropics back then.
Oh, too hot?
Too hot. And I think diseases like drinking out of ponds and stuff might have too many bacteria or parasites and things. Because humans can boil the water, but dogs can sneak off and still drink it. And that might be the case.
Wormies, tropical worms. No. It would bum me out. Yeah. What about co-evolution? JP wants to know.
Whether there is science to support the idea of co-evolution between humans and dogs. Thanks so much. Bye.
Have humans evolved alongside dogs or is the timeline like we were humans and then dogs evolved after us?
We are very much human in the sense that we are now. Like 50,000 years ago, you could take somebody and put them through school and they could do the SAT just fine. They could read Shakespeare, like the people that were painting all the caves in France and stuff. So we were human by then. And when we were interacting with dogs, I don't think there's been enough time to fully co-evolve.
But there are some like biological adaptations that like dogs have picked up or we've bred into them that they have definitely co-evolved with humans, to say the least. And there are certain things like dogs sleeping near you does calm you down, helps you sleep better. Just petting a dog can lower your heart rate kind of stuff. So that counts.
Do we know if dogs enjoy petting too? They do, right? Do you think they always have?
Some people will comment, like when I post a video of me petting my dog, that like, he's uncomfortable. You should stop or like read X, Y, and Z sign. But that's just my dog. But other times he'll like paw at me to keep doing it. So I guess that's the case. And then my beagle and my lab, especially my lab, just like, if you weren't petting her, it was like distraught. So, yeah.
Typing out an angry email. More pets.
Can I interest you in the professional science paper titled, Shut Up and Pet Me, Domestic Dogs Prefer Petting to Vocal Praise in Concurrent and Single Alternative Choice Procedures. So it found that given eight three-minute sessions of petting, both shelter and housed dogs preferred petting to vocal praise and that dogs showed no evidence of satiation for petting. Please continue.
The researchers postulate that petting is likely this unconditioned stimulus, and it promotes social behavior in dogs, but vocal praise likely has to be specifically conditioned. But petting is just like, I love this. Now, what about me? You're asking me. Well, a 2022 paper, Effects of Contact with a Dog on Prefrontal Brain Activity, a Controlled Trial,
found that prefrontal brain activation in healthy subjects increased with closeness to a dog and that hanging out with a dog stimulated more brain activity than interacting with a non-living stimulus like a stuffed animal. So yes, listener Anne-Marie Everhart, dogs tend to like being petted, and it's somewhat symbiotic. Brain, feel good near dog.
So did dogs evolve, or were they selected to make us feel gooder and gooder over time? Now, the 2021 study, Current Advances in Assessment of Dogs' Emotions, Facial Expressions, and Their Use for Clinical Recognition of Pain, notes that yes, domestic dogs can make facial expressions to convey their experience to us, and they can also read our face.
And whale eye refers to when you can see some white of a dog's eye as it turns its head away from you. And this can express anxiety or fear or discomfort. And in humans, this is called side eye, it's called stink eye, or it's called shade. Now, how else do dogs let us know what's on their minds? Asked Katie Oldham, Jacqueline Church, Lisa Gorman, Ryan Ketchum, Coforia's Classroom, TTL 101, and...
Poison Cheerios, first time question asker. What behaviors did dogs develop because of human domestication?
I've never seen too many wolves up close or wolves 20,000 years ago, but apparently wolves don't bark. They will when they're playing and stuff like that, but they don't bark in the sense that dogs do as their form of communication. And that was certainly bred in dogs as a warning bark probably first or to indicate there's an animal when you're hunting, but also... Just as a communicate.
Because I know cats meow more around humans. So it's probably the same thing. If they don't meow so much in the wild, they just do it to get our attention.
That's nuts, isn't it? Just to think that they know that that works. Of course it does.
Yeah. And it's also cool because cats are the same thing. They're in the order carnivora. They're a social predator the same way. And they just... Like, we all interact so, like, similarly in that sense.
Lee Wang wanted to know, someone once told me that dogs have a much more muted pain response because when they were in the process of getting domesticated, humans didn't want to take care of sick or injured dogs. And that's why we have to be really proactive about monitoring their health. Is there any way to know that, about their pain response being muted?
I can say... Like anecdotally with my dog, he won't let me know when he's in pain and shepherds are notorious for being whiny. And then I know for a fact, dogs in the past have like skeletal trauma, either from being kicked or, you know, kicked out of camp or it's hard to tell if it was a fight with another dog or they got gored by a, you know, a boar or something.
Hard to tell, but yeah, dogs had a hard life for a long time, which yeah, significant bummer.
Yeah, significant bummer. That's a big SV right there.
A bunch of people wanted to know about the Americas, and we did talk about that a bit, but Adam Foote, the Bloated Toad, Chan Verbidge, and Grace Robichaud wanted to know, the Bloated Toad asked, what about Native American dog breeds? I remember hearing somewhere that Chihuahuas are originally from the Americas. Is that true? I've also heard that there are some breeds of Chihuahuas
dog that are now essentially extinct, the line is extinct, that were domesticated by indigenous Americans, or indigenous North Americans now. Any evidence on that?
Yeah. Dogs, so when the Europeans got here to the Americas, they brought dogs with them as well, but the indigenous had dogs. But with the overwhelming amount of population of the Europeans that came here when the colonial era started, those dogs interbred with indigenous American dogs all up and down South and North America to the point where the genetic lines of pre-contact dogs are gone.
But to my best understanding, a Chihuahua is a Mesoamerican breed, but it's been bred so many times with European dogs and then back to like a Chihuahua kind of thing that it has European DNA more than indigenous DNA. It just looks like a Chihuahua. The Xolo too, the same, the hairless dog in Mexico, same kind of thing. And then there's the American Dingo, which is the Carolina Swamp Dog, has some
DNA still. And then the Greenland dog is one of the only remaining indigenous American breeds that's left.
Now, what about behaviors that have been passed down through the ages or have remained from natural wolfy instincts? Let's talk fetch. So Lori Pemberton, listener, notes that dogs seem to instinctively know that's a ball and it's for me. And Olivia Eliason asked, is it true that it was dogs that taught us fetch? They were not alone. Salmon like the fish are
wants to know if dogs used to help us gather and carry firewood is this why they still love fetching sticks so much they say that their old lab would pick up as many sticks as physically possible sometimes around 10 at a time carry them all the way home and then drop them on the front doorstep without fail and they never knew if this was an instinct or just a quirk fetching sticks yeah
Fetch, to me, is a social bonding mechanism between humans and dogs. It bonds you. It's like dogs love play that strengthens the bond. But fetching, I believe, is a direct quirk that comes from hunting. Whereas like a dog, like if you treat an animal, like you treat a raccoon or you treat something, dogs run up to the tree and bark and like scare it until it's stuck in that spot.
And then the hunter can get it. Or if a human shot a bird with a shotgun or a bow back in the day and it fell, like dogs love to go get that and bring it back. And I think that's all fetch is. And it's just a redirection of that because dogs are essentially around to hunt and fetch is like a good outlet for that. And they just love it. But yeah, social bonding mechanism.
My dog does not care about fetch at all. She refuses. Yeah.
She won't. My lab wouldn't either.
Really?
Yeah.
Is that odd for a lab or...
Like, no joke, I would throw the ball and it would just like bounce off her head and she would just sit there staring at me. But my shepherd, he loves fetch, like to the point where it's annoying. So I found that interesting.
Well, Ren S. wanted to know, they say people talk about inherited traits like prey drive and obedience and aggression, activity level that seem to follow breeds. Is this a real phenomenon or just a correlation or false attribution because of how we socialize dogs that look a certain way? Or do they really do have those traits hardwired?
i would say that's definitely hardwired because dogs are bred specifically to do certain things like a greyhound or a whippet wants to run like really bad and it has to run or it's going to go mentally kind of crazy in the house terriers are bred for ratting like they want to find little things and rat and labs are bred to swim if i remember correctly or retrieve and then Yeah.
Dogs just want to do that stuff. And like my shepherd too, like he can't turn it off. I went to a lake house with my friends for a bachelor party. And the first thing he did was just go sniff every inch of the perimeter and constantly patrol. Like he was like having a blast and I didn't tell him to do that. He just does it. Yeah.
Now, what if a dog's idiosyncrasies are screaming at strangers or trying to eat cats?
Megan Peeler, first-time question asker, asked, why do people tend to be much more anxious of large dog breeds than small ones when, in my experience, Megan writes, small dogs seem much more likely to be aggressive and large dogs are often pretty chill and laid back, which was echoed by Sarah Filo and Megan Ratcliffe.
Now, Genetosaur asked, why all the bully breeds are basically marshmallows in a brick body? A few people asked about aggression. Like when it comes to dog breeds that are considered dangerous, Gail Lane asked, i.e. pit bulls, is this more due to how they're treated or are there truly inherent dangerous traits? Avrin Keating wanted to know, can you discuss pit bull origins in Flim Flam?
I see arguments all the time online where some people say pit bulls are kind nanny dogs and others who say they were bred for bull baiting and inherently violent. When it comes to stigmas of pet dogs, what's the anthropology behind that? And like, let's say choosing a dog that would be good for your family or for your lifestyle.
Yeah. And this one's always a sticky answer, but I'll just be honest. I think I love pit bulls. Like they've always been sweet with me and stuff. The only dogs I've been bit by have been pit bulls, but that just happens to be because I sample size of two that have bit me. But I can't say as an anthropologist, like,
Breeding dogs for specific tasks like ratting or racing or things like that, that they are bred for these things, but socializing them to not do that is going to pull that out of them from that last question. I can try to socialize my dog as best I can not to patrol the house, but he's still going to do it. So one thing I always heard was it's not the breed, it's the breeder.
Pit bulls are sweet to me. Like I've had so many sweet pit bulls in my life that I've met and like they're fun to play with. And so the huge head and their big mouth is so cute to me. But if the breeder is breeding them for those specific nefarious reasons or whatever their origins used to be, that line of dogs might just tend to be more inherently aggressive because that's what they're bred for.
But other pit bulls can be bred to be completely sweet. So... Yeah, it's very sticky. I'll say that. But again, just how intrinsic dogs are in our culture in terms of like even with like a culture war or like different ethnic identities and stuff dogs are associated with.
And it's interesting too to think if we're all humans, but your uncle might be a dick, your other uncle might be super sweet. You know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly.
It's like these little family lines come down and who knows what comes up with temperament. I live in LA where pit bulls are, there's plenty of them and they don't get adopted very often. And I know a lot of people who have them as family dogs and absolutely no problems. I know others who... I have a friend who had to put down a pit bull because of an attack, so it's kind of all over the map.
Shepherds can also have behavioral issues just like that. There's a lot of shepherd rescues. Malinois, for sure, because they're not... A Malinois, to me, is a supercomputer. It's just a flesh robot.
Yeah, yeah.
Like in terms of a biotechnology, but you know, if they're not properly exercised and like use their brains the way they're supposed to, like they can be aggressive and it's not just pit bulls.
But make sure that they're getting a lot of exercise and doing what they want to be doing and getting their energy out. Right.
Yeah. Especially a mental simulation that could even help more than exercise sometimes.
I have a husband like that, who if he doesn't go run around, he gets not bitey, but he definitely gets grumpier. It's like ADHD and not running around.
I have ADHD as well. So it's like, I remember hearing that and I was like, yeah, your husband is me. Yeah, exactly.
If he doesn't have something that it's exciting for him, he gets really grumpy. So yeah, it's like, yeah, that's all of us, you know.
And if you need a wealth of free information on ADHD and my beloved husband, Jared Sleeper, you can see the three-part ADHD episode. And yes, we will link it in the show notes. But, you know, some people asked about health issues with certain breeds. Don Smalczyk wanted to know, how far back in time do breed-related health problems go?
Like, is there any historic evidence, you know, for things like hip dysplasia or respiratory problems with pugs and Frenchies and stuff like that?
I can answer that specifically for the Americas. A lot of dog skeletons that are found, their spinal column, like the Oh man, my anthropology friends are going to kill me. I can't remember the word, but the part of the spine that sticks straight up in a dog that sticks straight up in our back, the thin part of the vertebrae. Spinous process. There's a lot of times it's like curved pretty badly.
And I would have thought that was from wearing packs or like pulling things that causes that, you know, pathology. But another study was saying that it just seems kind of natural. Like over time dogs, it'll happen to them. I will say like the Saluki is bred naturally.
a long time ago or the greyhound and they have that giant thoracic cavity for that pulmonary system to pump the blood through its body to run fast. So if you're breeding a dog to have this giant chest to be like a race car, like if you have something so positive, there's probably also negatives back then too.
Some, however, are just adorable. And Colby Evans and first-time question asker Lindsay Wallace asked, is it true that beagles have white tips on their tails to assist humans in seeing them through the grass when they're following a scent? And thank you, Colby and Lindsay, you both asked that because you made me go down a metaphorical badger hole about this.
And according to the 2019 study, true colors, commercially acquired morphological genotypes, reveal hidden allele variation among dog breeds. informing both trait ancestry and breed potential. Explained, if dogs inherit one copy of a specific white spotting gene variant, they typically have some white on their feet, chest, face, and tip of the tail.
But if dogs inherit two copies of this particular variant, however, then they're often mostly white with just some patches of color. So one copy, they have a tuxedo shirt and socks. Two copies, you name them, spot. Now, this paper went on to explain that people historically chose dogs with white in their coats when they needed to be able to see the dogs better.
And people who use dogs to hunt or retrieve game, for example, need to keep track of the dogs in heavy brush or vegetation, and white coloring makes dogs much more visible. Now, the white tail tip seen in hunting and herding breeds, those have been given a devastatingly cute name. It's called the shepherd's lantern.
A little white glow wagging around in the grass where your doggy is, it makes me physically nauseated with affection. Mana wanted to know when and why did humans start breeding tiny dogs that suffer their whole lives?
Some people are asking about smoosh noses and whether or not you think that in the future humans will start breeding dogs to have longer muzzles and things like that just to avoid health issues and vet bills.
Yeah, I would say it's one of those like We were too worried if we could. We didn't stop to think if we should kind of situations. I just think I butchered the line. But yeah, that Victorian era, there's just dogs of all shapes and sizes and pugs and mastiffs, like a bloodhound in that sense too. We just get a little overzealous with breeding to be so different that it can probably cause issues.
And I know dachshunds too, being so long, have that spine issue too. I've seen a German shepherd mixed with a corgi on the internet. It's adorable, but that poor thing's hips and spine must just constantly be in pain. So I would say like the Victorian era for sure, and maybe even in Roman times.
And for more on this, Kayla White, Erin White, Sonya Bird, Manna Storm, Don Smolchak, and Nikki G, you can see the 2023 article in the Journal of Canine Medicine and Genetics bearing the ominous title, Brachycephalics. Once a problem is seen, it cannot be unseen.
which cites this French Veterinary Association's guidance that only functionally and clinically healthy dogs with breed-typical traits should be used for breeding, i.e. only breed dogs that do not suffer from any serious disease or functional disabilities.
And the article also states that vets don't want to judge their clients' love for certain breeds, but it predicts that in time, breeding practices will start to trend toward healthier variations on dog breeds.
and even by the height of the roman empire they had influencer caliber dogs like little lap dogs greyhoundy ones obtained from the british isles and one absolute beast that appears to be the size of a junior varsity football player but with a huge melon and a face that looks like a melted tire this behemoth war dog was known as a molasses.
And if you're like, I want a monster to cuddle and follow around with a heavy bag of its poops, good news. Some readers are trying to resurrect it by backtracking through lines of mastiffs. I mean, is that good news? I mean, I say no when you have so many lovable hairy babies waiting for you in shelters.
We can versus we should is very on point, which is just the kind of the story of the entire human species. But Dana Owens and Aaron White wanted to know about smelling fear or smelling pregnancy. Dana Owens says there's a saying that dogs can smell fear. Is it body language or actual chemical response? And Aaron White wanted to know if dogs can tell when you're pregnant.
Apparently wolves and sanctuaries can. How much can they glean about us just from scent?
I saw a doc where they had people watch a horror film and then people watch like a just regular happy film and collect their sweat. And then they like put that test tube up to a dog's nose. And if it was like a fear response from the horror movie, the dog kind of like freaked out and cowered a bit. And then in the other one, like their tails would wag and stuff like that. So there's that.
I know dogs can like tell when I'm anxious like my dog does for sure. You can tell when you're crying and stuff like that.
Get yourself in front of the 2022 paper. Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odors, which found that acute psychological stress response in humans changes the volatile organic compounds emanating from our breath and or sweat. And it's detectable to dogs. Dogs can smell your stress and fear on your mouth and in your sweat.
And in an early 2018 paper, Interspecies Transmission of Emotional Information via Chemo Signals from Humans to Dogs, explained that in smelling odors associated with fear, dogs display more stressful behaviors themselves and they have higher heart rates. So can dogs figure out what's going on with you before you know or before your Instagram followers know?
Probably even your pregnancy announcements. You betcha. And they deserve a small, tiny piece of cheese for that, they told me.
I did just see a neuroscientist say that there's a machine they built, like an AI thing, that can tell if you're pregnant and can also tell who the father is, which is wild to me. But I imagine since dogs' scent receptors are so much, like by the thousands, stronger than ours, that could be possible.
Yeah. Cheaper pregnancy test, probably. Literally. Chandler Witherington said, I've heard this theory that any dogs left on their own for long enough after a certain number of generations will revert to default dog form with pointy ears, sandy brown short hair, something that looks like a Carolina dog. A jaunt down a wiki hole told me. Any truth to that?
Oh, that's what the dingo is. It was a domestic dog. If not a domestic dog, it was a dog that followed humans around after domestication to Australia. And then once they got to Australia, realized there's a whole continent full of kangaroos without a dog-like thing. The thylacine was there.
That's the now extinct Tasmanian tiger. So RIP. We have a whole episode on Tasmanian devils. So if you need it, we'll put it in the show notes.
But dingoes kind of pushed out the thylacine in a sense, too, because they're just so effective at hunting. They even introduced a dog to Australia that then became a wolf because it just had such abundance to hunt and do all those things. And that's a standard yellow pointy-eared dog.
Are they considered native now or invasive? How is that classified?
That would be a whole episode. But it's a very political... And then indigenous versus, you know, colonist debate. And there's a lot of stigma against dingoes, kind of like there's stigma against wolves here. But the science to me kind of says that, like, they've been in Australia for upwards of 10,000 years. The environment has had enough time to adjust to them.
So they are kind of natural in that sense. And the same thing that indigenous Australians are natural to the area in that sense, too. So I don't know. It's a very politically charged debate.
Now, many of you, such as Evan, Saluki Haver, Faran, Shibu Inu parent, Karina Bruce, and Jannie Rounds, as well as Keforia's classroom, asked about the most ancient dog breed, the most unchanged from wolves. And for years, if you asked the Guinness Book of World Records, it would have pointed to the long-snooted and the ponytail-eared Saluki. But via this groundbreaking study in 2022 titled,
Arctic-adapted dogs emerged at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Researchers found that there was a noteworthy genetic similarity between the ancient ancient dog and modern Greenland sled dogs, and it indicated that the major ancestry of modern sled dogs traces back to Siberia some 9,500 years ago.
And now, while the Victorian era produced a lot of different breeds of dogs, the throwback breeds include the Senjis, who have been depicted in African artwork going back 4,500 years, and also the so-called New World, pre-Columbian, North American pups like the hairless treasures, the Zolos. But like you probably don't know the names of all eight of your great grandparents.
I mean, I dare you to try. Like, do you know the names of your great grandparents? I know three. So I'm sorry, ancestors. But just like that, it's not easy for dogs to know their heritage. But people like David are looking desperately for dog remains. In your research, do you ever come across what you think are dog bones, but they're coyote bones?
All the time.
Yeah. How do you figure that out?
I get sent like, is this a dog bone? And it's like probably just like a chicken wing, but they'll send it to me. But yeah, so this is a soapbox of mine is that species is a spectrum. It's not a cut and dry thing. Evolution is not Pokemon, right? You don't just evolve into the next thing 10 seconds later. It takes thousands of years.
So coyotes, dogs, dingoes, wolves, and some jackals are all in the genus Canis, which means they can all interbreed. And there can be dogs that are mixed with coyotes, coyotes that are mixed with wolves. All of it is just they're all like a dog is a subspecies of the wolf to me, as is the dingo. They're all wolves that can interbreed.
So when you're looking at coyotes and stuff, it could be very similar to a small dog or a large dog, depending on. So the answer would be you just have to have enough of a comparative collection of dogs and coyotes to kind of match it up. But there are certain markers that you can tell, okay, this is a coyote. It's more slender than say a lab.
And then wolves are going to be way more robust, especially in the Americas. So it's hard to tell. And now you can do it with chemical tests and things like that too.
Several people, and this may or may not fall under your research purview, but Ruben Clasmo, Minty McGee, Stacey Pinkowitz, Harper Atlas, and Jaden Guildenstern want to know, what is the deal with the smell of dog paws? It brings me instant joy and calm. Why do they smell like corn chips? Why do they smell like Fritos? Why, why, why? Everyone wants to know.
An ex of mine called it puppy crack. Because like it's just such an addicting smell. Apparently it's like a fungus or like something that like some kind of chemical that's emitted. But yeah, the corn, like the Frito feet, it just, I love that smell. And then the inside of their ears too is like a very distinct smell.
It's like a yeasty smell that you're like, that's my doggy.
Yeah, exactly. And then everyone loves their own dog's smell, but then other people are like, your dog stinks, dude. And I'm like, no, he does not. He smells amazing.
And yes, listener Ren S, whose special interest is dogs, they say that corn chip foot flavor is due to a combination of bacteria, pseudomonas and proteus, which combine with spit and sweat to produce a yeasty smell. And I read up on it, it tends to be harmless, although those bacteria can sometimes be present in UTIs in dogs.
And you can wipe down your pup's feet and trim the hair on the paw pads to keep them fresh, But in general, huffing their little mitts while you spoon them should be harmless. That does make me wonder, when dogs are digging around in their blankets or digging around on a flat surface that absolutely cannot be fluffed or modified at all,
Our dog does that on the couch where it's like there's nothing to fluff. There's nothing to change. It's just the couch. Is that an instinct from digging a bed in grass? What is that from?
Yeah, wolves make a den. Coyotes make dens as well. I think that's what it comes from. I did see a study that dogs always turn a specific way because they want to face a certain direction, like cardinal direction, like a pigeon, I guess. They can home in a certain sense.
Let's look at the 2013 Frontiers in Zoology paper.
Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth's magnetic field, which gathered data on several thousand poops and pees of unleashed dogs in an open environment, and they discovered via data on these thousands of poops and pees that dogs opted to excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis, and they avoided the east-west axis of the compass for their pooping and peeing.
So now you know that. Now as for sleeping, some researchers note that sleeping like a sphinx with the head resting on the front paws could signal a dog wanting to nap but still ready to jump into action if need be. Now sleeping on the back in dogs is associated with comfort and trust but also with it cooling off by exposing their belly.
And the donut position can, of course, trap body heat if your pup is chilly. And personally, when our dog rests her chin on any part of us, we freak out silently. And I feel like I've been kissed by the pope, but in a good way.
But I mean, my dog will spin three to six times on the bed and then decide he doesn't want to sleep on the bed and leaves it. Like, it's just so odd. Yeah.
Last listener question. This is very specific, but Allie B says, I taught my dog Raya to play a toy piano for treats. Adorable. Sometimes it seems like she's enjoying her little tinkling little notes. Do dogs enjoy music, do we think?
I have heard... That is correct. Yeah. I can't think if it was a scientific study or like a Snapplecap fact, but I've heard that before, that they do enjoy music and like they can tell when, like I leave NPR on for my dog when I'm gone. So there's something going on, which has music and talking to calm them down.
And if you want studies to back this up, you can see the 2020 paper in the journal Animals. And it's titled Musical Dogs, a review of the influences of auditory enrichment on canine health and behavior, which mentions that in the presence of classical music, dairy cows are more chill and they produce more milk. But listening to rock music stunts the growth of hogs.
Slow string music resulted in more time spent lying down. for pigs. What about dogs, though? We're here for dogs. Now, the paper notes that the soundtrack of rock and heavy metal music induced undesirable behavior and physiological changes in dogs, such as increased barking and standing up. Although researchers don't know Maybe that was just the dogs trying to thrash to some death core.
Maybe they loved it. Now, other studies, the paper notes, reported that classical music had a calming effect compared to controls, but the sound of praising words and intonation activated reward regions in dog brains. Also, playing an audiobook
induced calmer behavior than classical music so just leave this episode on repeat for them when you leave the house because they are good boys and girls perfect sweeties or let them thrash you know your dog best but yeah like when i'm jamming out he's always stoked and sometimes dogs will howl with it and stuff the idea of a toy piano too is like that's really that's cute speaking of loving it
I guess one other question from listeners. Kristen wants to know, I love my dog. Is he capable of loving me back? How would I know if he loves me? Is that quantifiable? Do you think that dogs love the indoor life and food and pets and cuddles and fresh water? Or do you think that they love us?
Dogs, to me, are like... A wolf adapted to life among Homo sapiens. So like that would be how I define a dog. And in that sense, whatever life they have with a Homo sapien, like their sole existence is to interact and be close and social with humans. So yeah, I would think so. I don't know how to quantify it, but yeah, like my dog loves me 86.72% repeating.
So like, I don't know, but I would imagine so. Yeah.
You can always believe that they love you.
Yes.
That's free and easy. You can always set up a button for them to press or just not worry about it because they're not humans. We can't expect them to heal all of our wounds as much as we would like that. Last questions I always ask everyone, what sucks the most about your job? Like what's the shittiest part of being an ethnocynologist? There's got to be something.
In the same sense, the suckiest thing about archaeology is I will never know exactly what happened or how dogs came to be without a time machine. And another thing, too, is we worked on a mammoth site last year where a mammoth got killed Then there was a camp built around it where they were butchering it and tanning all the hides and stuff. This was in Wyoming.
And there's a big carcass of a mammoth right there. They probably either kicked the dogs out of camp or chained them up somewhere maybe. But you're never going to see...
evidence of dogs in the middle of like the activity area so i would have to just dig shovel tests all the way around the site just hoping i found the dog bone because they usually hang out on the outskirts of site so the thing that sucks the most is like dogs are very hard to find archaeologically unless you just stumble upon like a burial where you see their bones and like a trash heap from being eaten like the later you go into history the more dogs you're going to see but way back in time not sure and that does i guess suck i guess to answer the question
Do you ever have dreams that you find dog remains on a dig?
My absolute pipe dream of a site would be like a human gourd on a mammoth tusk. So knowing they were going at it and then like his dog also near it. So just to confirm that all of that was going on at the same time or her dog, you know. But yes, I do. Like everyone has their dream find, like just to find a really, even if it wasn't like groundbreaking, just a very nice place. ornately buried dog.
And you can get that connection with those people from like 14,000 years ago, like how much they clearly cared for this animal as well, which is kind of humbling to me.
Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat from a nightmare about being on a dig or having forgotten your tools or anything like that? Do you have stress dreams being an ethnocynologist?
Yeah, I think we all do. I accidentally broke a mammoth bone on accident on a dig because I was trying to get the sand out from under it before we put the cast over it. And for whatever reason, I just yanked and I just split it in half and I was like... Which is fine because you glue it and bring it back to the lab anyway.
But yeah, just dreams like that where I broke something and I can't bring my dog to sight anymore because he's just so special where he like... will run into the big pit of bones and take one or lay in it. He just doesn't get it. But the other dogs leave it alone.
But yeah, in terms of nightmares, I'd say that... And I also have nightmares of giving a conference presentation and everyone's like, you're wrong.
Oh no!
Yeah.
What about the best thing about what you do?
It's just so wrapped into archaeology for me, but... I guess I can answer it this way. Like I studied stone tools in grad school as well for my master's and like, making stone tools. And the process of that is called flintknapping. And there's so much science and physics that goes into it and skill. And it's kind of works the same area of your brain as chess.
So like Neanderthals made very complex stone tools, Homo erectus did. So to sit down and flintknapp, you really do get into the mind of ancient people and how intelligent they were. Because like, if you've never made a stone tool, like if I handed you one right now, you wouldn't know what to do.
Yeah.
And like I've done it for five years now and I'm nowhere near like an expert at it. But just to sit there and be like, wow. And then like if you imagine sitting around a campfire making stone tools and stuff and then just the dogs running around and things like that, like telling stories around a fire.
I love anthropology because it can get an archaeology like I can get into the mind of somebody who lived that long ago just by like understanding their tools and dogs as an extent of that as well.
Well, when's your next expedition that you're off on?
Oh, man. Next summer, I think we're doing some more testing out here in Wyoming to look for more sites. Again, it's hard to just pull up a dog. You can only hope. But that would be the next big one. And then if Russia ever opens back up, I'd love to go to Siberia and just hunt in caves for different dogs that are there. Dead dogs, like old, ancient ones.
I have a question for you, if you don't mind. I was asked this at the end of my podcast, but what do dogs mean to you? If you had an answer to that.
Oh, I think that's a great question. For me personally, it's almost a proxy for a continuation of family. And I found out I couldn't have kids in my 30s. And I didn't know if I wanted kids anyway. I wasn't sure if I would be good at that. But for me...
When my husband and I decided to become like life partners and get a dog, like that meant a family to me in a way that I think I otherwise wouldn't experience. And, you know, I think it seems silly to both of our moms that we baby our dog so much, but this is our family. Like she is our child in a way because I know I won't have one.
And so as soon as I was able to get a house, like that was the first thing I did. So me adopting a dog was one of my first financial goals on Patreon, and so I took a poll on Patreon of your aunt's names, and a top name was Lynn. So my dog is named Gremlin, or Gremmy, and she bears the burden of my full obsession. I love her more than she would ever want me to.
I think it's brought out a part of me that's also made me more loving to myself because I would never treat my dog the way that sometimes I would treat myself. So then it's like, okay, well, remember, you're a living thing too that needs rest and fun and play. So it's almost a mirror of the love we should show each other that we show for our dogs. You know what I mean?
I love that. That's a great answer.
That's a long answer, but I never really thought about it until right now.
Cool. Usually people are thrown off and have to think, but yeah, no, I like that a lot. I haven't really thought about it from the surrogate child angle, you know, because my dog's kind of my son in a sense. Yeah.
I mean, it's funny too that it's like some dogs can be like a coworker and a family member and a guard, right?
A therapist.
Yeah, a therapist. And I know this person that works in grief who says that when an animal dies, it can be more impactful to us than even a friend or family member because that animal saw every aspect of your life every day. They were there, you were there with them 24-7, but it's not always understood how big of a loss that is. For more on that griefologist, you can see the thanatology episode.
I agree, for sure. I remember... We had to put our beagle down when I was in high school. My dad and I just sobbed at the vet place. And then 300 came out that day. So we were like, let's just go watch the very opposite of crying with your father. Yeah, I won't forget that because it was such like a juxtaposition day. But yeah, it's brutal.
Like my cat too, when I lost him, I just like wept for like three days. Then I was like, okay, but I've never lost a human that close to me before yet, knock on wood. So it's just like, yeah, it's tough. And that's just ethnocynology to me too. Like they're so, I keep saying intrinsic, but just part of human life that it's like inseparable in that sense.
They really do teach you how to love on a different level without guards, you know?
Yeah. Unconditionally.
Yeah. Which I think a lot of people aren't able to feel that in other ways. And they teach you that that's okay, which is amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, keep looking for dog bones because I want to know more of their backstory.
Yeah. If I know more, I'll post it.
And you can follow his work on his website, which we'll link. You can also follow Ethnocynology on Instagram or David Ian Howe on TikTok. He has two podcasts, Ethnocynology with David Ian Howe and The David Ian Howe Show. So now you know how to find him. What about a book? Do you think you're going to do a book? I get asked all the time. Oh, you should do a book.
Book agents, get at him before someone else does. I know you're out there. I know you're listening.
I appreciate you having me. Oh my God, of course. This is really fun.
So ask wolfy people what you're wondering because doggone it. The world is weird, and it's great, and let's focus on what's good here and there, shall we? So the charity was NativeAmericanHumane.org, and David has also started the Strider Memorial Project and Charity for his late beloved companion, and that's at GoFundMe.com slash ethnocynology.org.
You can find out more about ethnocinology and David Ian Howe at Instagram.com slash ethnocinology on YouTube and TikTok at David Ian Howe. And his podcast is Ethnocinology with David Ian Howe. And we'll put more links to his stuff as well as studies that we talked about on our website at Alleyward.com slash ologies. slash ethnocynology.
I'm laughing a little bit because Grammy is shaking her collar in the studio and making some noise. Normally, I would just retake that, but here we are. She's an additional contributor to this episode. Also, heads up, we do have classroom-friendly and kids-safe episodes on our spinoff podcast called Smologies, which you can find wherever you get podcasts. It's also linked in the show notes.
Look for the new green artwork. You can also join our Patreon and submit questions before we record at patreon.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. We have totes and shirts and sweatshirts and hats and stickers. Thank you, Erin Talbert, for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook group.
Thank you, Aveline Malik, for making our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. The lovely Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale, top dog, is our managing director. Jake Chafee is our well-tempered assistant editor. And Apex editor is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn howled out our theme music.
And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's that I was in Las Vegas for CES to speak at a panel about the podcasting industry. And I got some yogurt and some water for my room. I was trying to fit it in the minibar fridge, which was kind of cramped.
So I took out some like white claws and tall boy beers and whatever was in there to jam in my Greek yogurt. And after a few minutes, I saw a tiny note on the side of the fridge that everything in there was on a sensor system and you would straight up be charged for anything you lifted up. So I called the front desk to be like, hey, Lowell, I was just trying to refrigerate a yogurt.
And they told me that if I put anything of my own in the mini fridge, it would cost $50 a day. And also, I had racked up $93 in minibar charges because I lifted up some cans. even though I didn't drink them. So I took my yogurt out, I put the cans back, and I begged for forgiveness. Sin City, baby, where you can do anything you want except refrigerate yogurt for free. So I have learned.
So make sure to hydrate regardless, take care of yourselves, and kiss your dog on the forehead for me. Okay, bye-bye.
Hackadermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, litology.
You're my best friend.