When We Talk About Animals · Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School

Ep. 49 – Dog Cognition Expert Alexandra Horowitz on the Quiddity of Puppies

·1 hr 3 min·2 clips

Alexandra Horowitz describes dressing her son as a ghost to test puppy Quid, borrowing a Swedish working-dog drill.

1. When We Talk About Animals, a Yale University podcast, devotes Episode 49 to Alexandra Horowitz's book The Year of the Puppy, which follows one puppy, Quiddity, through her first twelve months. 2. Horowitz is a New York Times bestselling author, the founder of the dog cognition lab at Barnard College, and host of the podcast Offleash, interviewed by hosts Jennifer Skeen and Viveka Morris. 3. Her thesis is that puppies are not objects of a manual like "Perfect Puppy in Seven Days" but individuals with a developing point of view, and she paired daily notes on Quid with research on each developmental stage. 4. Newborn puppies, she says, are mostly tactile and olfactory, with ears folded closed and eyes shut, and the mother stimulates excretion and cleans them before eyes and ears open within a couple of weeks. 5. She describes a socialization period from about three weeks to 14 weeks in which puppies absorb anything new, from vacuum cleaners to a child on a scooter, and cites Konrad Lorenz's imprinted geese as a contrast. 6. To test Quid, Horowitz copied a Swedish working-dog community's drill by having her son walk out of the nearby forest as a ghost in a hood and caftan, which set off a long bout of barking. 7. She began observing litters before lockdown in March 2020, then focused on one litter, and compares her approach to Jean Piaget studying his own children while admitting she later felt sorry that Quid was scrutinized so much. 8. Borrowing from a trainer's game, she recommends finding 50 behaviors you like and rewarding them, saying "it was easy to find 50" and that the exercise shifts attention from disruptive behavior to cooperative behavior. 9. On spaying and neutering, she says she "stepped in something foul and smelly" by raising the topic, and argues gonadal hormones matter for bone, muscle, and brain development, so owners should make informed individual choices. 10. Suited to dog owners, new puppy adopters, and readers of animal cognition books.

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