Last night Tom came in from outside, saw the leash in my hand and hightailed it upstairs. I went to get him tossing treats at him to let me get near him and then treating leash on/leash off. We've done this game before and he kind of likes it. I brought him downstairs and started giving treats for the various stages of teeth brushing. He did okay. Then I put some of the vanilla toothpaste on the finger brush and he sniffed and turned his head away. Okay got the message Vanilla tooth paste is bad. We had a good thing going when I had poultry toothpaste and he'd lick it off the toothpaste before and after as a reward. I think I've lost ground using the vanilla. Opal will lick it but doesn't appear to like it that much. And she was raised to be good about handling.
I definitely recommend watching the BBC Horizon: The Secret Life of Dogs.
One hour and it goes over a lot of the most recent research work with dogs. I tend to buy into Coppinger's theory that it never made sense that humans "domesticated" dogs to become hunting dogs and instead dogs were scavengers of farming communities that gradually entered our homes. It is an interesting idea about wolves scavenging from hunter/gatherers kills. I also don't really buy into the "would agriculture have made it without dogs." There must be primitive agricultural societies out there that don't use dogs? Dogs only help with livestock so plant based agriculture would be fine without dogs. And plenty of small ivestock farming is done without dogs, I think.
One of the parts I found most interesting was the study where humans identified dog barks. The researcher would record the noises the dogs made in certain situations. For example, in one case the dog was tied up and the person walked away from the dog. Then the recordings would be played for people and they would say what they thought the dog was feeling/communicating. The people used in the study were shown to correctly identify likely emotions. I would be interested to know what humans were picked for the study. Dog owners? Dog professionals? Could any person in the population identify the dog barks or only people who paid a lot of attention to dogs.
It's great to see video of the Balyaev experiment, too. Wow. After three generations of artificial selection for tameness, much reduced aggression. 8 generations they seek humans. I didn't know that they did cross-fostering of aggressive (bred for aggression, not just normal) pups and tame mothers and vise versa. The mothers didn't make any noticeable difference in aggressiveness/tameness. And they also implanted embryos of the opposite group in tame/aggressive mothers and saw no noticeable difference. Very cool.
I'm also amused about the discussion of dogs as parasites. Mooching off humans, taking their focus away from having children. Though at this point it might not be such a bad thing for the planet to have fewer human children. Coppinger would take it a step farther to say that we are just if not more detrimental to dogs: breeding them so they can barely function or reproduce, reducing genetic variation, forcing them to live inside and euthanizing them when they can't adapt, etc.
They also discuss how dogs can be used to study the diseases humans and dogs share. Interesting idea about how the limited genetic diversity in dog breeds makes it easy to pinpoint genes related to diseases.
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