Many dog lovers would call an area densely populated with puppies paradise, a place conducive to the highest level of happy chemicals; to Dr. Brian Hare and science writer Vanessa Woods, this place is also called a classroom.
Since 2018, the couple have partnered with the nonprofit Canine Companions, the largest provider of service dogs in the United States, to run Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University, where Hare is a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology. The puppies participate in a 12-week program, engaging in games to test traits like memory, self-control, and social cognition. These exercises track their developing cognitive profiles, providing insights into how puppies transform into dogs. (Their research at the Duke Canine Cognition Center and the Puppy Kindergarten also appeared in Netflix’s “Inside the Mind of the Dog” documentary this summer.)
This academic approach to understanding puppy minds emerged from the apparent lack of service dogs — after months of costly investment, less than half of the dogs in training graduate to become service animals, according to experts quoted in a 2022 Kaiser Health News story.
Hare and Woods’ new book, “Puppy Kindergarten: The New Science of Raising a Great Dog,” which debuted in August, details their ongoing pursuit to remedy this problem through their research. Their primary goal is to identify the cognitive abilities that will help predict a puppy’s future training success, thereby creating a more efficient and productive system for raising service animals. But along the way, they also learned new ways to help any puppy owner raise their floppy-eared friend.
Hare, a Harvard alum, will return to Boston Tuesday, Oct. 22, to discuss the book with actress and animal behaviorist Isabella Rossellini. In advance, Hare and Woods sat down with the Globe to discuss coauthorship and important puppy findings.
Q. “Puppy Kindergarten” isn’t your first book together; you also co-wrote “Survival of the Friendliest” and “The Genius of Dogs.” Do you have a process for coauthorship?
Woods: We like to email each other, even when we’re sitting right next to each other. So we find that if we have changes to make, we’ll just email them. We find that the written word comes across with more patience.
Hare: We hammer it out. And the funny thing is, I’ll be reading [and] I’m like, “Ah, why did she change ‘that’? Why would we say it that way?” Then I go to track changes and turn it back on, and I wrote ‘that.’ So it’s a marriage.
Woods: It’s definitely a marriage. It’s compromise. It’s long.
Hare: And you love to do it.
Q. Through the Puppy Kindergarten, what would you say has been the most significant finding?
Woods: A generation ago, what we expected from our dogs was very different from what we expect today. When Brian and I were younger, our dogs were out all day. They slept outside. Now, our dogs are very much a part of our families. And people always say, “Is there a breed of dog that can really fit into this urban lifestyle that we have?” And we were like, “Yes, service dogs.”
Hare: Yeah, so the big discovery is that service dogs — because of 100 years of selecting, rearing, and training to be family members — are models of what we actually want our dogs today to be. And the surprise is that the ancestry of [pet] dogs is not necessarily trying to get them to be great family members who are confident around strangers [unlike a service dog’s ancestry].
Q. You go through a lot of misconceptions that people have about dogs. What would you say is the most common misconception?
Woods: That breed tells you much about the dog, apart from what they look like.
Hare: It’s not that breed tells you nothing. It’s just that people over-ascribe meaning to breed.
Woods: And that’s just because there’s just so much variation within a breed.
Q. And that was a very interesting point in your book. How dogs are individuals, and there’s a lot of cognitive variance within each individual dog.
Woods: Yeah, I think they’re just like kids in that way. The way we think about intelligence can really be uni-dimensional. But, actually, there can be multiple intelligences, and being good at one thing does not necessarily mean you’re going to be good at another thing.
Q. What was the process like creating these cognitive tests [for the puppies]?
Hare: All the games that we created are inspired by work with kids. They’re games that are from the literature on children and how children develop, and that means that they can be directly compared to primates and all sorts of other organisms.
Q. So, as dog owners, were there any major personal takeaways from the Puppy Kindergarten?
Hare: One of the big things I learned was if a puppy is before 13 to 14 weeks, crying in the middle of the night, it’s not trying to manipulate you; it needs to go to the bathroom. Go get your puppy. They’re not going to learn a bad habit to manipulate you or try to get you up in the middle of the night until they’re adults.
Q. The puppies had a pretty large impact on Duke’s campus. What was the impact that you experienced?
Hare: We were trying to answer the question about puppy development, but now it’s become this separate thing. It has its own life, where, now, Duke students really value having puppies on campus. Our goal was to have them raised to help people, but even in the process of raising them, even the ones who won’t make it [to service dog status], they’ve already had a massive impact, because they were on Duke’s campus, bringing joy.
Q. Do you still tour the dogs around the Duke campus?
Hare: Oh yes.
Q. So they’re like little celebrities on campus?
Hare: I think that’s absolutely right.
Woods: They have their own Instagram page.
Q. One well-documented dog lover is E.B White, the author of “Charlotte’s Web.” He had a dog named Fred. E.B White wrote [in his essay “Dog Training”], “[Fred] even disobeys me when I instruct him in something he wants me to do. And when I answer his peremptory scratch at the door and hold the door open for him to walk through, he stops in the middle and lights a cigarette just to hold me up.” What would you recommend to an owner to help a dog like Fred?
Woods: I think sometimes the things that you find most annoying or challenging about your dog end up being what you love most about them, right?
Hare: Yeah, don’t always fight the idiosyncratic traits of the dog you love.
DR. BRIAN HARE
With Isabella Rossellini. Oct. 22, 7:30 p.m. $30, includes book. 18+. Museum of Science, 1 Science Park. mos.org
Interview was edited and condensed. Derek DiTomasso is a writer based in Boston.
This post was originally published on here
