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| comment | | "parent_author":"",<br>"parent_permlink":"pets",<br>"author":"odveri",<br>"permlink":"pets-are-good-for-us-but-not-in-the-ways-we-think-they-are",<br>"title":"PETS ARE GOOD FOR US\u2014BUT NOT IN THE WAYS WE THINK THEY ARE",<br>"body":"By Simon Worrall\nPUBLISHED NOVEMBER 25,<br> 2017\nhttps:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/content\/dam\/news\/2017\/11\/22\/booktalk-animals-among-us\/01-book-talk-animals-among-us-Bradshaw-The-Animals.adapt.470.1.jpg \nJohn Bradshaw and his colleagues had to invent a new word\u2014and the new field of \u201canthrozoology\u201d\u2014to describe their work studying the interactions between animals and humans. In his new book,<br> The Animals Among Us,<br> Bradshaw now demolishes a few myths about the pets that increasingly crowd our homes. [Find out if your dog would eat you if you died. \n\nSpeaking from his home in Southampton,<br> England,<br> Bradshaw explains why most scientists didn\u2019t consider the bond between humans and their pets an important area of research; why women of the Awa-Gauja tribe in the Amazon breastfeed monkeys; and why having an animal in the house is so important,<br> especially for kids whose world has increasingly been reduced to a smartphone screen. [Discover why your dog eats poop. \n\n\n VIEW IMAGES\nCOURTESY OF HACHETTE BOOK GROUP\nOne of the myths you question is that keeping pets is good for us. I think most pet owners know they are!\n\n\nInitial research showed that people with pets survived longer after heart attacks than people without pets. The most likely explanation is that these were people who,<br> other than having a heart attack,<br> were in a better state of health than people who did not or could not have pets for a variety of reasons.\n\nThis has been borne out recently in studies by the Rand Corporation,<br> which looked at large samples of people from California. They showed that pet keeping is practiced by people who can afford it,<br> not just in financial terms but also in terms of lifestyle. People who are settled,<br> have children,<br> who live in a house rather than an apartment,<br> and\u2014to put it bluntly\u2014are white have better health. But it\u2019s not because of the pets. The pet is the consequence of the healthy life,<br> not the cause of it.\n\nOther assumptions you question are whether animals can feel embarrassment or guilt,<br> and whether their minds are capable of deliberate planning. I think if you saw our Dalmatian\u2019s face after he has been bad\u2014or when he is carefully planning his escape from the yard\u2014you might reconsider!\n\nYOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE\nHow War Dogs in Iraq Rekindled a Lost Military Tradition\nWhy Your Dog Eats Poop,<br> and Other Odd Pet Behavior Explained\nThieves Are Breaking Into Zoos and Stealing Rare Animals\n[Laughs Yes,<br> I can see that. People do interpret these behaviors as if they are intentional. The question is,<br> what kinds of emotions do they feel? Alexandra Horowitz in New York showed that the guilty look is actually a sign of the dog\u2019s very acute ability to read human body language.\n\nDogs put the guilty look on almost before the owner knows it\u2019s time to get angry about something the dog has done. They almost seem to react as fast as our conscious minds can. As soon as you look at the dog,<br> the dog is already looking guilty.\n\nYou make the assumption that the dog was looking guilty before you looked at it. But the science shows that the dog doesn\u2019t start looking guilty until the moment the owner\u2019s body language is visible to it. You don't have to say anything. It can be just a slight stiffening in posture.\n\nDOG FACIAL EXPRESSIONS CHANGE WHEN WATCHED BY HUMANS A new study shows that when given human attention,<br> dogs will produce a wider range of facial expressions. Click here to read Dogs Show 'Sad Puppy Face' More Often When Being Watched.\nSo,<br> what kind of mental abilities do you need to feel guilt? In our human terms,<br> guilt is quite sophisticated. You have to compare something you have done at some point in the past with some internal norm,<br> which you have learned over the course of a long period of time. There\u2019s no evidence that the canine mind can do that.\n\nI am not saying that dogs are stupid. Their minds are very good at doing what they do. They can react more quickly to human body language than humans can. But we anthropomorphize,<br> assuming they emotionalize identically to us,<br> and that\u2019s the mistake.\n\nAs for deliberate planning,<br> there\u2019s also been a lot of research but not so much into dogs. The problem is making comparisons between animals. Although we all have a vertebrate,<br> mammalian brain,<br> the details of the construction are quite different. The cerebral cortex,<br> the bit we do most of our thinking with,<br> is reduced in dogs. They rely a lot more on smell,<br> decoding odors. They do have a limited ability to plan,<br> if they\u2019ve encountered a particular situation before. But they can\u2019t imagine themselves into a situation they\u2019ve never been in.\n\nYou helped coin the term \u201canthrozoology.\u201d Explain what it means\u2014and why it was needed.\n\nIt\u2019s the study of human-animal interactions. It is an evolved word that started with a journal at Tufts University,<br> in Boston,<br> about five years before we founded the society with the same name. It was necessary to have a word to describe what we were doing because it wasn\u2019t conventional zoology.\n\nAt the time,<br> in the 1990s,<br> zoologists who worked on domesticated animals,<br> like I did,<br> were regarded as an inferior race. [Laughs So the few of us who were interested in these things decided we would form a society to bring the various disparate threads together,<br> from zoology,<br> psychology,<br> and other sciences. You can now get degrees in anthrozoology in quite a number of countries,<br> including the UK and the United States. It\u2019s taken shape more than we thought it might even 25 years ago.\n\nIn some societies,<br> women breastfed animals. What purpose did this have?\n\nThe Awa Guaja are a matriarchal society,<br> and monkeys are taken from the wild and given to the women. The men are generally the ones who kill the baby monkey\u2019s mother. The babies are then brought back,<br> breastfed and then fed on pre-chewed food and eventually fruit and nuts. They are a status symbol. The head woman,<br> the matriarch of the village,<br> is allowed to have the most monkeys. They drape themselves over her head and shoulders,<br> like a badge of office.\n\nIn Japan,<br> there is a tradition among the Ainu people,<br> whereby women breastfeed bear cubs as part of a status-building exercise. Their family would go out at the beginning of spring when adult female bears are coming out of hibernation and have cubs with them,<br> and take the cubs away. The cubs have not been weaned at this point,<br> so they have to be fed on milk,<br> and they\u2019re breast fed because that\u2019s part of the ritual. Later,<br> there is a bear meat feast where these bears are killed and the surrogate human mothers get very upset. It\u2019s not clear from the accounts whether they are genuinely upset or if it\u2019s just part of the ritual. I suspect it\u2019s partly both.\n\nYou write that \u201cpets are,<br> to a certain extent,<br> imaginary constructions,<br>\u201d and that the idea of animals being \u201cheroes\u201d is misleading. I know a lot of people won\u2019t agree with that idea,<br> so can you explain it for us?\n\nThere are a number of concepts in there. The one I object to is the idea that an animal can be a hero. Heroism is a fairly doubtful concept even in human terms. Why do people sacrifice themselves for the greater good? It\u2019s easy enough to rationalize it after the event. In the heat of the moment,<br> that\u2019s not something I\u2019m qualified to talk about. But it\u2019s not as altruistic as we make it seem to be afterwards.\n\nTo be a hero,<br> if there is such a thing,<br> an animal would have to consciously give up something and put itself at risk in a situation where it knows it\u2019s at risk. I don\u2019t think that any of the animals that have been given awards show this.\n\nThey\u2019ve been put at risk by their human handlers\u2014not deliberately of course. They went with their handler to a place where the handler was attacked and the dog did what it was trained to do: defend the handler. The dog wasn\u2019t doing that because it had some greater good in the back of its mind. No dog\u2019s mind thinks like that.\n\nTo some degree,<br> our minds turn everything we see into an imaginary construction. What we\u2019re doing with pets is mainly an anthropomorphic arrangement. We tend to imagine that they have thoughts and intentions rather like ours,<br> but are just not able to express them quite as well as we can. This is an important part of the human mind. We like to project our minds onto everything. That includes our pets!\n\nDo you have pets,<br> John? If so,<br> tell us about them and what they have taught you?\n\nNot at the moment. I have a grandson who\u2019s very allergic and so we\u2019re having a break. But I\u2019ve had pets for 40-plus years,<br> ever since I was a student. That said,<br> I\u2019m not really any more of a pet enthusiast than the average family man. I\u2019m a biologist who studies pets.\n\nI\u2019ve had a succession of dogs who\u2019ve taught me a great deal about what it\u2019s like to be a dog. I\u2019ve had a succession of cats that have lived in the house,<br> bred,<br> and raised their kittens,<br> so I\u2019ve experienced and enjoyed the whole life span for both species. This has taught me how different these two animals are. Above all,<br> my pets have taught me the individuality of animals and how,<br> if possible,<br> we should treat and think about them as individuals.\n\nHopefully,<br> for the sake of the animals,<br> our understanding in the future will be tempered by better knowledge of what the animal is imagining about us,<br> which may be quite different to what we think it might be. The research is not finished by any means,<br> but so far there has been no indication that dogs think about us. But they are capable of thinking that we think about them. [Laughs \n\nThey interpret our behavior in quite a sophisticated way. But what scientists have yet to get to grips with is what kinds of rules they use to interpret our behavior.\n\nWhat doesn\u2019t seem to be the case is that they know what we\u2019re thinking. It\u2019s much more about being able to analyze what we\u2019re doing on a microsecond basis,<br> compare that with a data bank of what\u2019s happened in the past,<br> and react very quickly. This convinces us that they know what we\u2019re thinking when,<br> in fact,<br> they may not at all.\n\nI do think having animals around is essential but until I started doing research,<br> I didn\u2019t know why. It was something I just felt,<br> and a lot of other people feel,<br> that you are somehow a lesser person without this kind of contact.\n\nI don\u2019t distinguish\u2014and most research has borne this out\u2014between pet animals and wild animals. It\u2019s just that pet animals are much more accessible. Contact with wild animals,<br> whether a bird table or feeding a hedgehog in the back garden,<br> is all part of the same thing as having a pet.\n\nHaving a pet in the house teaches us what animals are,<br> in a way that watching a cute puppy or kitten video on YouTube does not,<br> especially for kids. It teaches them about animals and the reality of what biology is. So many other things in our lives are being reduced to what we can see and do on a screen. Animals are a healthy antidote to all that.\n\nThis interview was edited for length and clarity.\n\nSimon Worrall curates Book Talk. Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor.com.",<br>"json_metadata":" \"tags\":[\"pets\",<br>\"animal\",<br>\"cats\",<br>\"dogs\",<br>\"nature\" ,<br>\"image\":[\"https:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/content\/dam\/news\/2017\/11\/22\/booktalk-animals-among-us\/01-book-talk-animals-among-us-Bradshaw-The-Animals.adapt.470.1.jpg\" ,<br>\"app\":\"steemit\/0.1\",<br>\"format\":\"markdown\" " | | vote | "voter":"odveri",
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