The Deal With Animals with Marika S. Bell
84: How To Build a Bond With a New Dog with Stacey Colino and Jen Golbeck (December Special!)
December Special #1 ! Transcript
What if you could uncover the secrets behind the extraordinary bond between humans and their canine companions? Renowned authors and dog-lovers Jen Golbeck and Stacy Colino join us to explore this fascinating topic in detail. Their latest book, "The Purist Bond: Understanding the Human-Canine Connection," beautifully explores the science behind how dogs enhance our lives in countless ways. The duo shares intriguing insights from their research, personal experiences, and their collaborative writing journey.
This episode takes you on an enlightening journey through the world of dog ownership. We share the joys and challenges of raising these loving animals.
Guests:
Jen Golbeck is the “internet’s dog mom” and creator of the social media sensation The Golden Ratio. A professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. She and her husband rescue golden retrievers who are senior or who have special medical needs and give them a safe and comfortable life. Find out more at JenGolbeck.com.
Stacey Colino is an award-winning writer specializing in health and psychological issues. She is the coauthor of numerous books, including Count Down, Emotional Inflammation, and Disease Proof. Stacey is a lifelong dog lover and has owned three rescue dogs.
Guest Book Recommendations: The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein and The Soul of All Living Creatures: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human by Vint Virga
Connect with Stacey and Jen:
@ColinoStacey @jengolbeck @thegoldenratio4
E6: Dog Bites: The Fallout and Emotional Toll wit…
E27:
Show Credits Thank you also to John Lasala for his beautiful music and audio engineering on Series 11!
Read the Blog! (Guest profiles, book recommendations, trailers and more!)
What to start your own podcast in he Animal Advocacy or Animal Welfare Space? Check out my Podcast Mentoring Services!
December Special #1 ! Transcript
What if you could uncover the secrets behind the extraordinary bond between humans and their canine companions? Renowned authors and dog-lovers Jen Golbeck and Stacy Colino join us to explore this fascinating topic in detail. Their latest book, "The Purist Bond: Understanding the Human-Canine Connection," beautifully explores the science behind how dogs enhance our lives in countless ways. The duo shares intriguing insights from their research, personal experiences, and their collaborative writing journey.
This episode takes you on an enlightening journey through the world of dog ownership. We share the joys and challenges of raising these loving animals.
Guests:
Jen Golbeck is the “internet’s dog mom” and creator of the social media sensation The Golden Ratio. A professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. She and her husband rescue golden retrievers who are senior or who have special medical needs and give them a safe and comfortable life. Find out more at JenGolbeck.com.
Stacey Colino is an award-winning writer specializing in health and psychological issues. She is the coauthor of numerous books, including Count Down, Emotional Inflammation, and Disease Proof. Stacey is a lifelong dog lover and has owned three rescue dogs.
Guest Book Recommendations: The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein and The Soul of All Living Creatures: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human by Vint Virga
Connect with Stacey and Jen:
@ColinoStacey @jengolbeck @thegoldenratio4
E6: Dog Bites: The Fallout and Emotional Toll wit…
E27:
Show Credits Thank you also to John Lasala for his beautiful music and audio engineering on Series 11!
Read the Blog! (Guest profiles, book recommendations, trailers and more!)
What to start your own podcast in he Animal Advocacy or Animal Welfare Space? Check out my Podcast Mentoring Services!
This is the Deal with Animals. I'm Marika Bell, anthrozoologist, cptt, dog trainer and an animal myself. This is a podcast about the connection and interaction between humans and other animals. I know what you're going to say. We get it. Marika, you like books, but this isn't just another book review.
Speaker 1:This is an episode about how to build a bond with a new dog, and I think you might see where this is going, since I recently adopted a dog and also have had a difficult time bonding. When the behaviors a dog demonstrates are challenging to live with, this can make the bonding process all the harder. So I wanted to talk to both Stacy Collino and Jen Goldbeck about their new book, the Purist Bond understanding the human-canine connection. In this special episode, you're going to learn a little bit about their writing process and collaboration, but also about the complexity of the human-dog relationship, surprising discoveries from their research into this book and the many ways in which living with dogs makes our lives better. And if you enjoy this episode, keep an eye out for my new podcast series Understanding Uma, a podcast about my journey over the last six months of integrating our newly adopted dog into our home, with two kids, two cats and plenty of challenges. But for now, thank you for joining me as we ask the question what's the deal with animals?
Speaker 1:All right, now we're doing a roundtable episode today with the I don't know. Would you call yourself co-authors, is that? I think that's very okay. Co-authors Jen Goldbeck and Stacy Collino. Why don't you say your names, introduce yourselves, so people hear your, your, the sound of your voice and share your pronouns?
Speaker 2:I'm Jen Goldbeck. I'm a professor at the University of Maryland. My pronouns are she, her.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:I'm Stacy Collino. I'm a health and science writer, and my pronouns are she, her as well.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, both of you. So we're here to talk about the purest bond understanding the human canine connection, which is a book that you both wrote together that is coming out November 2023. So, depending on when people are listening to this, it's either just come out or it's about to come out and would make an excellent uh stocking stuffer or gift for for somebody who is an animal lover in your life, and particularly about dogs. Uh, so why don't we start with? I like to start with something that kind of gets right into the meat of it, so people really get an idea for what, what the goal is for this book. Why did you first think about writing it?
Speaker 2:I guess I'll start since I'm, since it's chronological that way. So I had started working this idea out with my literary agent towards the beginning of the pandemic like maybe June of 2020, because a lot of people were taking in dogs. I rescue special needs golden retrievers. We've got five right now. They've got a lot of fans on social media and I'm a science communicator and so it seemed like there was a fit to practice a whole bunch of things there.
Speaker 2:So I was working on the idea that would explore what we'll talk about is the really amazing science behind how dogs are good for us in basically every part of our life. Uh, and I've written a lot and I've talked a lot and I wrote a sample chapter and they were like maybe you'd like to have a writer help you with this, because I'm used writing for scientists and the general public and and after a Ouch, there's a little moment of, like my ego being hurt. But then I was like you know what? Like I actually this is a skill right that like I have not spent my life developing and it would be great to have someone work with me on this. So I started interviewing writers and Stacy and I hooked up and just had a great connection and ended up being real co-authors on this, like doing, you know, 50, 50 share of the work, as opposed to, like I tell Stacy the ideas and then she makes them sound nice. So it turned into a great partnership for us.
Speaker 1:How fun. Yeah, that's such a great way to be able to write a book too. I'm bouncing the ideas off each other and talking about it, and having somebody writing is typically such a solitary thing that I know when I write, I I think I'm okay, but I don't love doing it, to be honest, like it's not my favorite thing in the world, but I see that it's so useful. Right, it's something that needs to happen to get that information accessible and out there to people, but doing it with another person sounds like so much fun. So, stacy, how did you sort of get into this, your introduction to this and and why you decided to to join Jen.
Speaker 3:Well, I've collaborated on probably a dozen books over the years, and when my literary agent brought this possibility to me she said, well, you're probably too busy, you're not going to have time to do this. But I didn't want to rule it out. So she presented to me and I said are you kidding me? This subject matter is a total labor of love. I'm a complete dog person and have been my whole life. I want to meet her, I want to talk to her, let's make this happen. And so it was in this initial meeting with Jen via zoom that we just clicked and bonded, in particular over recent losses of dogs in both of our lives and the pain and the shocking level of grief that that can cause. I don't mean to take us downhill a slope here in terms of cheer, but we really sort of understood the depth of the connection that we each had to our own dogs, and that became both a unifying principle to the book that we developed and also a bonding element in our own relationship as co-authors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it, like I said, it just sounds like so much fun to be able to do this sort of project with someone. So the purest bond, the idea around it, is that dogs are good for us. That connection that humans have with dogs is beneficial, is healthy for us. How about for them?
Speaker 1:Oh, that's something that you I mean I haven't finished the book yet, you both know this, so maybe we haven't gotten to that too much. But yeah, what about for them? Is it just as beneficial for them? Is that something you looked into?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think my favorite story from the book on this is that. So we we talk in the book about this idea called attachment bonds. So this is an idea from psychology. It like originally comes up and is most often discussed in terms of children's bond with their parents and their mothers in particular. So it's a really initial way that we learn to attach to other people. That impacts us for the rest of our lives and we can form attachment bonds with lots of people, but they're very close relationships. They're people that we return to when things are tough, where we want to spend time with them, we feel safe with them. It's a really important kind of relationship and so hopefully you have this, like with your spouse, hopefully with your close family members and maybe a couple close friends.
Speaker 2:And there's interesting research that not super surprisingly to dog people shows that people form attachment bonds with their dogs, and so we talk about that in the book, but a piece of research that we came upon later in the writing process as that there's scientific evidence that dogs form those same kinds of relationships back with us, which are like hugely beneficial, and one of the really fascinating ways that they found this out is that there's functional MRI studies, fMRI studies of babies that show the parts of their brain that light up when they see their mother's face or you know, they're touched by their mom.
Speaker 2:And when they did fMRI studies on dogs and gave them the scent of their owners, the same parts of dogs brains light up, which kind of shows us that dogs are capable of forming those kinds of really intimate attachments which I think a lot of us would think of as human. But dogs can form them and they form them with the humans that they live with. So it seems like dogs really do love us and they get these really positive feelings when they're with us and can feel that love of the connection.
Speaker 3:In addition, another body of research looked at the release of a hormone called oxytocin in both humans and dogs, and oxytocin, as some people may know, is often called the cuddle hormone, the love hormone. It's secreted when mothers nurse their babies, when we snuggle and hug our partners, and this research found that both dogs and their humans the humans who own them and live with them both experienced the surge of oxytocin release after they've been petting the humans have been petting the dogs or after they've been looking into each other's eyes, and it's a mutual effect. So it basically shows this feel-good phenomenon on both sides of the relationship.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the dog lovers in the crowd will probably just people who've lived with animals, any kind of animals sort of understand that If you've had that kind of bond, that feeling that you get. I remember there's a particular dog that I had, ripley, who when we would cuddle on the couch and look into each other's eyes, it was like you could feel, it was like a wave coming out of your chest, just like, oh, I love you so much and the way he would look at me like you could tell it was mutual. You could just tell that he felt the same way and it's such a great feeling. And one of the cool things about the oxytocin hormone is that it also is released when we're protecting those we love. So you get a huge surge of oxytocin when you're really, really angry and protective of your loved ones, which I thought was really fascinating because it's usually referred to as, like this cuddle hormone or the love hormone, but it also is really there when we're super violent.
Speaker 3:That makes sense because there's another body of research that has found that oxytocin is related to trust, and so that goes into this protective instinct. When you trust somebody or you feel protective of them, you could swing into that mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's fascinating. So dogs are really, so they get some sort of benefit from the relationship as well. But something that you mentioned early on in the book which I thought just really resonated with me was the idea that the bond that humans have with their dogs is often referred to in sort of this parent-child relationship, when actually it's a lot more complicated than that and I thought maybe you'd want to go into a little bit of that complication, because that made a lot of sense to me. I feel like sometimes, when people refer to it as a parent-child thing oh, that's your child, your fur kid or your grand fur kid it almost downplays the importance or the extent of that relationship.
Speaker 2:It's a little infantilizing, right, yeah, that your dog is so dependent on you and you're giving everything to them. But it doesn't really capture a lot of the nuance of that relationship. And I will say I do have a puppy that we're fostering now like a four-month-old puppy-puppy and I do feel maternal, I guess, to the puppy, but the rest of my dogs I don't really think of in that kind of parent-child relationship in terms of mine with them. So there have been a lot of interesting kind of thematic studies where researchers will go talk to people and be like tell me about your relationship with your dog, what's the best part of it, what do you love about it?
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of different themes that emerge. So some are these kind of parental feelings but there's other ones about, for example, like feeling like you have a purpose which isn't necessarily parental, feeling like there's value in giving care to another creature, which I always thought that that was lovely, because I certainly feel like that. Right, when we started rescuing special needs dogs we do hospices, really complicated medical issues, and I felt like once we settled into how that works, it has given my life a lot of meaning, right, there's something really meaningful about being able to care for a creature in that way that to me doesn't feel at all parental, but feels like there's a really meaningful bond between us and I get something out of giving them that.
Speaker 3:For some people too, it's more of a friendship, and a very profound friendship, than parent-child relationship, and for some it's a mashup of all of these, along the lines of what Jen said about having a sense of purpose and doing something meaningful. For some people it's an organizing. Having a pet, as a dog in particular, is an organizing principle because it gives structure to their day between feeding times and going on walks and so on. It's a way for them to structure their day and find enjoyment and connection and meaning in it.
Speaker 1:So I was wondering, of the things that you researched, what was the most surprising to each of you? Some bit of information you came across that you weren't expecting.
Speaker 2:I think for me it was the impact that dogs have on communities. So when I was dating, before I met my husband, I was on the apps and I'd go meet people for coffee, say in the afternoon, but I would always bring my dogs. Let's go outside and get coffee and sit and talk, because the dogs are these great social lubricants. You never have to have the awkward moment where nobody knows what to say because the dogs are there. So we know that dogs can make social interactions easier and I think if you have a dog that you also learn the people in your neighborhood by their dog.
Speaker 2:I've made great friends with people who I encountered because of them walking their dogs Some of them, some other people I don't know their names, but I know their dog's names and it's like oh, it's so-and-so's mom or dad like taking them out for a walk.
Speaker 2:So that was expected. But the really interesting piece of research that we came across showed that in neighborhoods, the more dogs there are, the safer and more cohesive they are, the more dedicated people feel to their communities, even if the people don't have dogs, because the dogs are things that get you seen. They get lots of people out in the neighborhood, they kind of bond people together. So even non-dog owners start recognizing the people in the neighborhood. They know who they are. They're generally our positive relationships there. So just by having more dogs in a community brings that entire community together, not just in the one-on-one interactions but as a unit, and I thought that was pretty impressive, like pretty interesting. And then of course, reflecting back makes sense, right. All of the neighborhoods I've lived in that have lots of dogs have felt like there's more of a community there because you talk more. I think.
Speaker 3:One of the things that I found interesting and surprising was the extent to which dogs are in touch with what's happening with us, their people. We know that they are attentive to tone of voice, spatial expressions, body language, all of that. But the extent to which they can respond to our physiological and emotional states based on signals that we're emitting was just phenomenal. For example, one of the reasons why dogs can become medical assistant dogs and often tell when an epileptic seizure is coming or when somebody who has diabetes has low dangerously low blood sugar, is because of the changes in pheromones, smell and organic volatile compounds that we are releasing through our breath, through our sweat and through our body. Odor, and in some cases they can sense that there's a medical emergency coming up, but in others they can tell that we're just off, something is not quite right with us, and they may come and doad on us and look after us, and that kind of thing and just the many ways that they are in tune with us was really impressive.
Speaker 1:I'm always fascinated, too, by the idea that people get dogs for their kids. That always seemed like a bad idea to me, just because kids aren't responsible enough to take care of dogs. It always ends up being the adult in the family that really takes responsibility, and if you're expecting your kid to do that, then that's. I feel like that's setting them up for failure a little bit, if you really think the kid's going to take on the bulk of it anyway. But sometimes that relationship just is surprising and it grows and you don't even realize that that's going to happen.
Speaker 1:Your kid has a bond with that particular dog and I get stories all the time on the Deal with Animals podcast about people's first dog and their first relationship with a dog. That was just really meaningful to them as a child. So I just adopted this dog and watching her form relationships with everybody in the family in a really different way. It's not like you can adopt a dog and just it's now going to be your dog, right? The dog has some say in that whose dog they become, and I imagine each of you have stories about that as well, in terms of who the dogs have bonded with and why and what your thoughts were on that.
Speaker 2:I just finished reading the audiobook version of the Peerist Bond and in there I was talking about my dog, Riley, who we only had for seven months but was absolutely like the closest bond I ever had with a dog, and I had forgotten that. I snuck in one of my rants about this into the text of the book, where I was like all of our dogs like my husband better, Even the dogs that I got as puppies and raised before I met him all the dogs like him better. It's not fair. I take care of them, but Riley was the first dog who liked me best and my husband could be on the couch like feeding snacks to the other dogs and Riley would turn around and look at me because he like loved me best. Now that was his adults, but still it was so nice to be picked by a dog and have him love me best. For no reason I treated them all the same, but he chose me as his person and that was awesome.
Speaker 3:So I have two kids and neither of them has ever had a point in childhood when we didn't have a dog for more than a month and we had the dogs first individually. It just worked out that way. So they know what it's like to grow up with a dog, and the last two dogs that we've had were it came to me first because I usually fed them, I coordinated their walks. If I didn't give them their walks I would designate the walk to somebody else, and so they've always been very attached to me. But it's been interesting because they have formed their own attachments to every other member of the family.
Speaker 3:It's very democratic, and so with my boys who are now 20 and 25, the dog our current dog loves them to pieces and is happy to be taken care of them, buy them or when they come home, when they're away, she is just absolutely overjoyed to see them. Almost to the same extent she is in love with me, and so it's very interesting, and I think part of it is because I agree with you that it's a really bad idea to get a dog for little kids, because that can be a recipe for injury and disaster. You really have to train young kids on how to behave with a dog, puppy or older dog, and I think we've rescued primarily older dogs and so they're a little more acclimated to dealing with people and that kind of thing. But in our instance, the kids knew how to deal with dogs from a young age. They learned quickly and they just carried it through with different dogs and I think that that helps facilitate a bond between them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So this dog. I've been actually almost trying to make sure that I am not the one to feed it I am not the one to be its main main caregiver although it does always come down to me in the end Just so that the kids do have a little bit stronger connection with her or that she connects with them in a way that at least she sees them as a provider. We're having some separation issues with her and she is so anchored on to me as the person she doesn't want to not have around, that if I'm the one that leaves the house, that's the thing that she gets most stressed out about. If everybody else leaves the house doesn't bother her at all. I'm really hoping that by bonding to more than one of us, anchoring to multiple of us, that at some point I will be able to leave the house again with my family. And that sort of brings me to this idea of like.
Speaker 1:Dogs aren't always great for us, are they? They are beneficial. But there are some real downsides to bringing a dog into your home, at least for me. Initially it's been quite a shock to the system.
Speaker 1:We've been without a dog now for a year and both my dogs were geriatric and passed away over the last couple of years, and so we decided it's time to be looking for a new dog, and it took us a while to find the right dog to adopt.
Speaker 1:And now that we've got her, we're dealing with these issues that are making life really hard at the moment, though I know that they're going to be temporary, but the whole process was very anxiety provoking for me in terms of trying to build those relationships with a couple of foster dogs that we had for a little while and having that not work and then having this new dog come in and having her issues to deal with. With all of the research that you guys have done on the benefits of having a dog, did it really strike you that those benefits really outweigh the anxiety that having a dog can have, or that the problems with the training that people have? And why do we do this part of it? This part of it is so hard? How do we get through that and is it really really worth it?
Speaker 2:It's so funny, I can tell you are in that phase that I have been in many times where I weep with frustration at trying to take care of these new foster dogs that we take in. And sometimes that's a few months and sometimes it's a year Usually it's a couple of weeks where it's just overwhelmingly like stressful and frustrating. I think and, stacey, you can add some texture to this but I'll say like, generally in these studies, there is a small percentage of people who either report some negative responses and it tends to be a small percentage or a small percentage of people that just don't feel the benefits that other people have. It's not 100% of the time. Everybody, all the great stuff, and I think Stacey and I would agree that there's people who just shouldn't have a dog for one reason or another. And I'll say a lot of the dogs, especially when I was like really actively fostering and not taking in these special cases we worked with the Golden Retriever Rescue so I'd just take whatever dog came along and a lot of them were like two year olds one year olds clearly bought as Christmas presents for the kids, because there's nothing cuter than a Golden Retriever puppy.
Speaker 2:And now that I am taking care of this foster puppy. People have been sending me this meme. That's like the Golden Retriever month zero to four. It's like the cute little Golden Retriever and then it's got like three years plus it's the adult Golden Retriever and the kind of four months to three years is of a loss of raptor, because that's kind of how they are. So I think there's a lot of people that we would see who get these puppies. They have them for a couple months and then they start getting big and bitey and crazy and they need a ton of time and attention and walks and ways to get that energy out.
Speaker 2:And the people don't have time and they've got kids and they're working and so they don't train the dog and the dog is misbehaved and they can do a lot of damage to your house if you've got full grown 80 pound dog who still thinks they're a puppy and eats everything, and then they end up crating the dog all the time to keep it from destroying it, and so a dog who really needs hours and hours of exercise is stuck in a crate and so then of course, when they're let out, they just go wild in the house and those are people who I think meant well but got into a situation where they really didn't know what was required and they're not reaping any benefits Like that dog is just bringing them stress and frustration and difficulty.
Speaker 2:The dog isn't benefiting. So this isn't a kind of self-help book or instruction book, but we talk in the kind of opening chapters about building a bond with your dog that you have to be willing to give all of that stuff and if you do it's usually gonna work out fine. But if you can't, there's no path for you towards the rest of this goodness. You have to give all those things that the dog needs, which can sometimes be really overwhelming.
Speaker 3:I agree. So the first dog that I adopted as an adult, with my husband, before we had kids, was an Australian shepherd and he was two years old. We got him from the SPCA in San Francisco no-transcript. He had been picked up on the street and two other families had tried to adopt him and neither one of them kept him for more than two weeks. So he kind of had a blemish on his record at the SPCA and we were cocky. We were like we grew up with dogs. This is a problem for us, we can handle him. We brought him home and, oh my gosh, was that dog a disaster. He had a submissive urination problem, he was aggressive around food, he was just chaotic and would shred stuff up and actually I misspoke. Three different families had tried to adopt him and none of them kept him. Anyway, long story short, I wanted to give him back within a month, but I felt so much guilt about it because of everything he had gone through before that I went to therapy.
Speaker 1:I have brought my dog up in therapy as well, yeah.
Speaker 3:And this is why I went. This was my purpose. I could not give this dog up because I really loved Wolfie, but I couldn't imagine how we were going to get over these humps. So we ended up hiring a dog trainer and implementing these systems to organize his behavior so that when I came in the front door we lived in a Victorian house, so I would take him right out the back door without even addressing him, so he didn't have a chance to urinate on the floor because he was so happy to see me and he could go out there. So we worked through it and within about three or four more months he turned into a great dog. But not everybody has that patience or the flexibility in their lives to do the hard work to get through those really stressful transitions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have money, because dog trainers are expensive too.
Speaker 2:We had taken in on. So I had a kind of friend and colleague who had agreed to take this like nine month old golden that people were giving away, and she was actually one of these situations no training, just wild. And she's like could you please foster this dog for a month for me before I move into my house? Because she knew I fostered dogs and I was like sure, and that dog was in my house for a week and all my dogs who are great hated him because he was so crazy he couldn't even eat his food. You put his food down.
Speaker 2:We do it in the basement, so he was away and he'd take one bite and then he'd run and like bounce off the furniture and bounce off the walls and run in circles and he couldn't eat another bite. He just had no control and I was like I cannot live like this. But I've promised to take care of this dog and my friend had never had a dog before, this was going to be her first dog, and so I think we spent $2,000 and brought the dog to a great trainer for board and train. So they stay at the place, they train there. You've got to look really carefully if you do that because the first one we went to was a guy who was like a former, like police dog trainer and was pretty aggressive and going to use some pretty aggressive things. I was like that is not what this dog needs. I will suffer with this craziness before I let you get this dog.
Speaker 2:And then we found a great trainer who by the end of this dog's week in training he went from not being able to eat his food because he was so crazy To this trainer putting him in a down in the lobby of this like pet care facility, leaving the building, walking a lap around the building while people came and went, coming back in, and that dog was still in the down just sitting there waiting for him. It was an amazing transformation and we've used that trainer for a bunch of our dogs who have had behavioral problems since then. It's great but it's expensive. It takes a lot of resources, it takes a lot of time and you have to keep up with it afterwards. They don't just come and then they're fixed. You've got to do all that stuff that the trainer has done in that process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really a long process, and I am a dog trainer, I think.
Speaker 1:At the same time, though, for me it was just such a shock because of the time it has been since I've had a dog in my house that I needed to train. Right, I trained other people's dogs in their houses, and it's certainly it's humbling, but it's also I'm not totally surprised by it. I knew that that might be coming, because every dog is different and living with it is a lot different than going in somebody's house and showing them how to deal with a particular problem and then being able to leave again. There's always a closer aspect of that and really like what you said to about what you give, you get right. You've got to put it in in order to get that connection back, and that really resonates too, because I've been holding myself back from this little dog because, again, I wanted other people to be her anchor as much as me, and so that bond has been really slow forming and I've only really just started to feel like maybe we're getting there a little bit as we get to understand each other.
Speaker 3:One of the things that I found with my kids that really helped everybody facilitate their own bond with this dog that we have now is giving some freedom with the rules for what they could do with her. So, for example, I have never let my dog sleep in my bed. I just don't want that. But the dogs have always had their own bed on my side of the bed, on the floor and we have this whole tuck in ritual. They're very happy with this, and so on.
Speaker 3:The kids were like, can she come on my bed? And I said, if you want her to have had it, and so that turned out to be a real bonding experience for them with Sadie, because she can jump on their bed and snuggle and sleep at the foot of their bed when they're in bed, and it was just like a different shape to their relationship than what she and I have, and I think that that's helpful. And my husband taught her how to play frisbee in the backyard and that's something that I wasn't going to do and that was a bonding experience for them. So I think the extent to which you can do that with each member of the family is really, really helpful.
Speaker 2:And I'll just say we have a dog now, remy. So Remy, we got and I think he was five or six. He had been on a chain his whole life, never had been to the vet, never let off the chain. He had a square bald patch between his shoulder blades where the hook on the chain had just rubbed all the fur off, and his owners realized at some point that he was blind, took him to the vet for the first time and it turns out he's a diabetic. He had diabetic cataracts which had made him go blind. And so the vet was like we need to give him insulin and do this and they're like, well, you can just put him down, like that's too much work. So the vet said no, handed him over to the rescue and he came to us.
Speaker 2:So this was a dog who had been on a chain, absolutely no socialization, he'd never been to the vet, he wasn't fixed. He just has so many problems Like he's, of course, a diabetic. He had thyroid problems, his fur was a mess, his skin was infected, he had all the tick diseases and worms and he was a jerk to my dogs. And the first thing you have to do when you've got a jerk of a male dog is get them fixed, like. We always get them fixed right away anyway. But because his diabetes wasn't controlled, he couldn't have anesthesia and so it took months before we were able to get him fixed. And I was crying on the phone with the vet I'm like you need to get this dog neutered, like I can't. We had to keep him separate from our other dogs and if they'd try to correct him he would just go into full fight mode, which is not a thing that I was used to, and I absolutely did not bond with him. I mean, I took good care of him Like I loved him, and it really took a year of getting all those medical problems controlled, having him spend a couple of weeks with that trainer and getting him on Prozac, which has made a profound difference in his life.
Speaker 2:I think that was. You know, we had had him about a year before we started the Prozac and once he got on that and everything else was controlled, he turned into like this amazing dog. He's a great codler and he like lays on his back with his arms spread out and just loves to snuggle and is so loving. And now I really feel like okay, like I'm not just taking care of you because you need it. We really love each other. But it took a long time. It never takes me that long with dogs, but this guy I still am like he's such a jerk right, like you push the wrong button and you don't know exactly what he's going to do. But now the Prozac has really helped and he's just. He's got the chemical addition that makes him a really good dog. But it took a long time to get that bond and I think, while that's not typical that it takes that long, it totally can be that way, depending on the circumstances.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when a dog has gone through so much physically even if he didn't have any super obvious trauma of someone abusing him, the neglect of just being out on a chain all the time and not having that social skills and knowing how to interact, that must have been really hard for him. I imagine that all of the things he did were all just so new to him also.
Speaker 2:Poor guy. Yeah, he had it really tough yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, of all the research that you've done, I imagine it maybe brought up some questions for you too on what's missing in the research around our connection with dogs. What would be some new questions you would want to ask that you think haven't really been answered yet?
Speaker 2:That's a great question, I think, for me and, stacey, I know you're interested in this. I don't want to speak for you, as this is your answer, but I think we're both really interested in how do dogs respond to this, because this book is written about our bond with our dogs, but it's written largely from the perspective of how do people feel and respond and what are the benefits that people get from this bond with the dogs. And we touched a little bit on how the dogs get benefits from that too, like we started off this conversation with. But I think we're both really interested in how do dogs feel about that. What allows them to love us?
Speaker 2:Like we talk in the book that dogs absolutely are capable of love, you can see it like biologically, chemically and then, of course, behaviorally. What is that like for them? What other emotions are they able to feel? What ones don't they? How do we understand what's going on in their brains more, and there's good research going on in that space but I think it's something that has to be approached from a really different perspective than how do people benefit from this, and that's something where I'd like to spend more time learning about that.
Speaker 3:I agree, I'm very interested in the emotional lives of dogs and the depth of it. There are a lot of things that are not known, for example, such as which emotions dogs don't feel that humans feel, where the overlap ends, and I'd like to see more on that. I'd like to learn more about that. And also something that I have wondered about in the course of our writing the Purist Bond that I would like to dive into a little bit more, is the extent to which dogs have emotional memory. How far back can they remember? What do they remember? Who do they remember? I have always adopted rescue dogs, and we got Sadie when she was about five. We've had her three years now. I still wonder does she remember her previous family? Does she remember mistreatment from the past? What is the extent of that? So I don't even know how you would study that, but I would love to learn more about that and see more research done in that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So a comment on the emotional lives of dogs. I have also wondered if there are emotions that animals and dogs specifically have that we just don't Like. We talk a lot about the emotions that we have, that we aren't sure that they have complex emotions and that sort of thing. But how would we ever know if there are emotions that dogs actually have that we have no knowledge of right, because they have all of these other well like, they're so in their nose all the time and they have better hearing than us and you know for the most part and and how that might change their reaction. We talk a lot about how sense are memory driven and memories, you know, contain the emotions as well as scent, and and it could be that there is this, this plethora of emotions out there that humans just don't have access to, that animals and maybe dogs specifically do, and I don't know how you'd ever know that, but it's, it's a fascinating idea to me.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting space where they you know a lot of the way that we study, for example, like do dogs love us? Is looking at. How do we detect that in people? Like we all can say that, but what if I'm like you know, stacy, I don't think you're biologically capable of love, like there's something wrong with your brain and you just don't know how to love anything?
Speaker 2:Well, we could, we could study that right, there are these neurochemicals, there's hormones that are released. We can see it in fMRIs, and a lot of the ways that we're studying this in dogs is actually using those biological, physiological, neurological markers from people and looking for the presence of those in dogs. You know, my guess is that they would say, well, our human brains are, like, bigger and more complicated than everybody else's, and so we probably have the most stuff. I don't know if that's right and that dogs may have other things, but I agree. I think their experience of those emotions, especially with respect to smell, which is so profound and really comes up a lot throughout the book, I think their experience of those emotions is so, so different than what we can comprehend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I always wondered how we I mean, I was always very skeptical about the idea that animals didn't have emotions and the idea that if you can't prove it and there's no way to ask the question to prove it, then you have to assume that it doesn't exist. And that was something that was pretty normal for a long time. With animal emotions we can't prove it because we can't ask them, so we just have to assume they don't. And that was very convenient for people who used animals for research or labor, because they didn't have to worry about animal emotions. If animals couldn't feel pain or they couldn't suffer, even if they did feel pain, then we don't have to worry about it. But as we know now, scientifically we can actually show that animals can suffer. We can show that the opposite, they can feel joy and love, and that's maybe even more important than whether they can suffer or not, because if you're just not giving them access to joy and love, then that's a suffering in and of itself. But the idea there's still this idea out there that dogs can't feel or we don't know how to ask the question of can they feel more complex emotions like jealousy or that sort of thing, and I always just thought that was fascinating because I feel like of course they can. They have this emotional center of their brain that they're so tapped into, it seems like, because they're not in their head all the time, right, they're not having, they're not doing math problems or not writing books. They must be doing something with that brain power and I imagine emotions are a big part of that for them.
Speaker 1:And I don't know what's the definition of something like jealousy. If my dog attacks the other dog because I pet the other dog, how is that not jealousy? Right, that's it's. It's a form of, it's a form of dominance, sure, because they're protecting me as a resource, and that's the scientific, unemotional understanding of the behavior. But that behavior comes from something right. There's some sort of initiation of that behavior and why they do it. And it's not just because you know I'm the resource, it's something else. And if their brain's working to similar our brains to, then it makes sense that they would experience something like jealousy, like don't touch that, it's mine. And I feel like there's so much more work in that area. It would be really, really interesting to see what's been going on recently with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think this has this made it into the purest bond, but I know some of the new research that Stacy and I have been looking at shows that dogs definitely have a sense of fairness and one of my and so that that would imply that they can feel jealousy and there's some research on that.
Speaker 2:But my favorite result on this is that if you put people in a lab and say you and I are in a lab together and your dog is there and I'm a jerk to you, your dog knows that I was a jerk to you and they will actually refuse to take treats from people who mistreat their owners. So that's a really complicated like social understanding of behavior and fairness and kindness and loyalty. Right, if I'm nice to you, the dog will come up to me and take a treat, but if I mean to you, the dog will sometimes not take a treat from me because they want to shun me from that. So there's complicated stuff going on there. We've, just when our our looking at the research, have just scratched the surface of that, but I think it's such a fascinating space.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is absolutely, and along those lines, something else that I've been wondering about is do dogs dream? We always attribute their sleeping twitches to them dreaming, and they may very well be that, but if dogs are actually dreaming, what are they dreaming about? Are they just chasing bunnies or biscuits in their dreams, or something more profound going on? I would love to hear a scientist weigh in on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Again, the scent seems like it would be something that would come into that a lot Like. Do they dream more in scent than they do in visual stimulation? And maybe they're smelling the bunny and instead of seeing the bunny. You know, I don't know. It is really fascinating. Well, and something you were saying earlier, Stacey too, about whether dogs remember things I actually introduced Uma Uma is the name of the little dog to her puppy that she has not seen in about six weeks.
Speaker 1:So her, the new owner of one of her puppies, came to our house for a play date and we're like I don't know what's going to happen, because she's pretty. She doesn't like other dogs very much. She gets pretty grumpy around other dogs, but she was in a foster house with lots of other dogs and did okay. She's met other dogs and while she's initially quite grumpy with them, she doesn't actually try to attack them. But we brought her puppy. I figured this would probably go fine. Even if she doesn't recognize him, She'll get used to him eventually, like she does with other dogs. So we brought them into the backyard and there was no moment where either of us could see. Oh, now they recognize each other right. Now's the moment where they realize it.
Speaker 1:But after that initial interaction they started playing and I haven't seen her play with another dog at all Like she will tolerate other dogs and be around other dogs. Her tail stopped flagging, it went low, it got swishy, Her whole body got swishy and they really just started going at it Just playing. Her main method of playing seems to be to run him into the ground, roll him over and bite his neck really hard and then he wiggles in excitement and she lets him up and then she chases him and rolls him into the ground again and that would just happen over and over and over again. And they both seemed super happy with that and they did this over and over. But they both had super relaxed postures.
Speaker 1:I've never seen her so relaxed with another dog before and we brought them into the house and he tried to nurse on her. Oh, so that tells me that like he definitely recognized her and she did not totally freak out when he did that. She ignored him and she just sort of moved away and didn't seem to notice or care that he was doing that. I don't think he would have done that to another dog, right, Like the whole trying to nurse and the fact that she didn't totally get upset when he did it and the fact that she was so relaxed with him. I think she did recognize him. I don't know when that moment happened where she recognized him, because she did initially see him and just lost her shit, but after that, like she was doing really well, so I think she did.
Speaker 3:I wonder to what extent his recognition of her had to do with scent recognition.
Speaker 1:Well, they definitely had to smell each other before they calmed down when they just saw each other through the door. She that's when she really lost it. She didn't want anything to do with him when she just saw the dog sitting outside the door.
Speaker 3:But I wonder if there was a moment where, all of a sudden, he thought, oh, this smells like mama, you know, and decided to nurse Interesting.
Speaker 1:I don't know, but it is a really fascinating subject and you know, we all have seen those stories in social media of like dogs seeing their owners years or after military service and there's this kind of lovely moment that happens. You could almost do the research using social media posts alone. How long were they apart and what kind of reaction was it when they got back together again? Did they have treats in their pockets?
Speaker 2:That's what my husband always says. When I'm like the dogs, always like you better, he's like well, I just smell like meat because you're a vegetarian, which I don't think is true, but it's nice of him to try to comfort me that way.
Speaker 1:That's yeah, very nice, very funny. So, ok, besides your own book, jen, if there was a book that you could give to all of the listeners, what would that be?
Speaker 2:Since I'm going to stick on the dog theme for this, mine would be the Art of Racing in the Rain. Garth Stein, I think, is the author. So this is a novel from the perspective of the dog and so and it is just like lovely and touching, and I think it's not at all a science book but I think it hits on some like really interesting aspects of the way that dogs perceive the world. I tried to get my husband to read it and he started crying, like in the first two pages, and so now he refuses. I know there's a movie version, but the book is great, so I think anybody who's a dog lover would really love that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I read that one when it first came out I think it was one of Oprah's lists and because I had a dog on it I was like oh, yeah and yeah. You would usually read science based books, but I found that sometimes reading these more novel books also give a lot of insight on how we as a culture relate to dogs and what we see dogs. You know their aspect in our lives and so I find them really interesting. From that perspective too, it's a good book.
Speaker 3:For dog lovers I would recommend, if they haven't already read it, the Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. It's just sort of a fascinating sociological exploration of pack mentality and dogs mentality and super, super interesting. It's a quick read and it's fun. And then recently I stumbled upon a book called the Soul of All Living Creatures by Vint Virga, and the subtitle is what Animals Can Teach Us About being Human, and it's really interesting. It's beautifully written, it's poetic and lyrical. Yep, I got it too.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say I think Stacy recommended it, so I have a copyright in front of me. It is, and it is a fast, easy read. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's what I'm gonna have to get. That sounds really interesting. And yeah, the hidden life dogs that's a classic and one of probably one of the first books where someone really said what are, what is it with dogs like what? How come nobody's ever written much about dogs before, because they're always just with us, and it's one of those things that people just take for. Granted for a long time and she really had dedication of following the dog in the middle of the night wherever he went. I thought that was amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was fascinating.
Speaker 1:Those are all really excellent Reads. Thank you for that. Now, how about your earliest memory of your connection with animals, Jen?
Speaker 2:So I grew up with a golden retriever named Goldie, who is one year older than me, and there's these like great pictures of me that I don't actually remember, out in the yard with her. But she, she was really my safe haven relationship all through my childhood and I still have dreams about her and I'm not really like a woo-woo dream person, but I like to pretend that's her just coming in to check in on me because she was just when a tumultuous childhood for me, like she was like the safe, wonderful thing though she did might be once, but I deserved it. I think I was three and I was like, oh, her tongue's hanging out when she pants. I'm gonna hold on to that. And she warned me about ten times before. She gave me a little chomp and I did a little scar which I feel like is a love reminder Of her, and that she like wouldn't put up with all of my bullshit sometimes. She was great.
Speaker 1:I love that. Yeah, I like that dogs tell us give us lots of time to to learn. I.
Speaker 2:Learned a great lesson. Don't do that anymore. Maybe teach kids also not to do that, which I don't think. I'm sure someone warned me once and I didn't take it as a the lesson that I should have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some of us learn faster than others too. Stacey, how about you I?
Speaker 3:Was a dog lover at a young age. I grew up with dogs, as I mentioned earlier, and my family moved around a little bit. When I was a young kid and when I was from the time I was about six to twelve, we lived in a suburb of the DC area and it was isolated like you couldn't walk anywhere. I couldn't even walk to very many friends houses. I had like three friends within walking distance and they all were super busy with after school activities. So after school I was bored. I would do my homework, I'd read books, I was into rock collecting for a while. So I decided to embrace a challenge and teach our dog Roscoe.
Speaker 3:A Poodle had to jump through the hula hoop that I wasn't coordinated enough to use. So I did and Eventually I got him to jump through it. Lots of treats were involved, I'll admit, but I got him to jump through the hoop when it was two feet off the ground and it made me feel really good. It made him feel really good. That Was a defining experience for our relationship, because after that the story is in the book to some extent. After that he started spending more time with me and when I would go in my room and read he would come and lie on the floor next to me. It really brought us together. And nobody walked their dogs in those days, they just let them loose in the neighborhood. But I decided I should walk him and groom him and do all these other things. So it just showed me that doing different things with a dog can also be a bonding experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is so sweet. I never had the patience as a kid to do any dog training with my parents. Dogs and one dog that I was super bonded to as a kid, yuki. I mean he just did whatever the heck he wanted. He would go off and do this thing and he never learned to play fetch. That was like I Remember. This major frustration in my childhood is that I could not get this dog to fetch because I had no idea how to train him how to fetch and no patience on learning how to teach him how to fetch. So when I got my first dog, I was like I am gonna teach this dog how to fetch and did that first dog I had, cooper. He became so obsessed with balls that he could not function if there was a ball around and and initially, you know, he didn't know how to fetch either, and it was just. It was a fun experience to be able to finally get that childhood wish of teaching a dog how to play fetch properly.
Speaker 1:That's there may be too strongly being able to have that a moment where you've really connected with an animal so much that you've actually Communicated what you wanted and they understood. I think that's what teaching trick teaching is all about. Right like those, obedience cues are not just. They're not just fun to do there, they're actually a bonding experience.
Speaker 3:They are.
Speaker 1:Well, Jen, what would you say is the deal with animals?
Speaker 2:I think animals are way less complicated for us humans to think about in terms of good and bad.
Speaker 2:Right like I can think of any person in my life, including people that I love to pieces and would go to battle for, and there's still something about all of them that I'm like, except this thing, which is definitely not their best feature, right, there's always something where it's like, oh, like my husband, who I I like loved to death, but he did say that one kind of jerky thing to me that one time, right, like, we've got these complications to our human relationships and I think in animal relationships we generally don't have that, even though the animals can be jerks, sometimes we feel like, okay, they're just like doing their animal thing, and I think that really gives us a kind of purity and clarity of being able to look at them and Read in all kinds of human things, and a lot of times that's correct and sometimes it isn't, but I think they're a really interesting Lens for us to think about our relationships with any kind of creature more purely, because they're free of all those really complicated things that we read into our relationships with other people.
Speaker 3:That's really interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I would add to what Jen said, and Because I agree with it completely. I think animals in general provide sort of a fascinating element or dimension to life and can show us Different ways to look at the world. Obviously, they see it very differently than we do, but I also think that dogs in particular have a really Amazing, profound way of showing us what love is pure, unadulterated love, and that's the purity and the clarity that Jen was talking about. I agree with that so completely.
Speaker 1:There's very few relationships that are so uncomplicated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even when they're complicated, they're way less complicated than human relationships.
Speaker 1:Thank you both so much for being on the episode today. I really appreciated chatting with you and I'm looking forward to finishing the book and maybe sending follow-up questions. So thank you both so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thanks, thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:That was Jen Golbeck and Stacy Collino talking about their new book, just released in November 2023 the purest bond understanding the human canine connection. Check out the show notes for links to their information and you can also go to the deal with animals calm. Sign up for the newsletter. Read the blog. The blog has all the info carried in the show notes, as well as more detailed write-ups about the episodes and the episode links which you can share with anyone you think might be interested in the episode. I would also love to hear your stories about your difficulties bonding with a new dog, so please send me a message on social media.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us as we tried to answer the question what's the deal with animals? I'm your host, marika Bell. The theme music for the deal with animals was composed by Kai Strascoff. You can see links to the guest book recommendations, as well as their websites and affiliated Organizations, in the show notes and at the deal with animals calm. This podcast was produced on both historical tribal land of the Snoqualmie and Quinal Indian Nations. For more information, go to the Snoqualmie tribes ancestral lands movement. So what do you think is the deal with animals? The deal with animals is part of the Irore animal podcast network.