I'm gonna talk about work with both primates and dogs. I'm gonna actually
focus a little bit more on the work with dogs, as Joanne said, especially the sort
of the science or the discoveries we've made and then but what I want to do is I
want to relate the science that we've done and the discoveries we've made
about dogs and dog psychology to the challenge of social housing. How do we
think about welfare? How do we think about what social housing means for
different species? And what I want to suggest to you today is I think that
taking an account evolution will be very very powerful as we go forward. All right
so I present a lot at a lot of different conferences in front of a lot of
different audiences and just like anyone who has their own area of research I
have my own methods that we have used and developed and I have to say that
sometimes it's a little intimidating to go to a conference where there are
people presenting fMRI approaches or maybe genome comparisons etc and I rock
up and I say well you know we've made a whole bunch of discoveries about how the
mind of animals works by putting food inside of a box and then closing it, but
that's what I want to suggest you today is that methods as simple as putting
food in a box and closing it can reveal much about the animal mind not just
species differences but something we've been really interested in more recently
individual differences. What is it that makes an individual animal potentially
different than another? So let me give you an example just to let you see what
I'm talking about this is an extremely powerful test believe it or not this is
our fMRI of dog phenotyping. Here we go we put it we put food in a box that the
dog has been able to get food out of this box previously but then as evil
experimentalist we seal the box and make it impossible for them to open.
You're gonna see this dog that is at the Canine Companions for Independence, it's
a group that trains the largest number of assistance dogs placed out with
people with mental and physical disabilities, this dog says I can get it
this is my treat, I'm getting it myself, I don't need any
help, whatever you do and we've sped it up because this dog was so adamant about
getting it.
So this dog is from the exact same population, raised exactly the same way,
trained exactly the way the same way, and it says hey human, you have a thumb get
the thing, come on, hey I can't get it out, I'm a dog, I'm a dog guys help me, help me
okay. So it ends up that this simple test
elicits very different responses across individuals in a population that has had
close breeding, has been reared you know almost identically, and you know it's
being trained in a very very similar way and it ends up that the silly little
test and the differences that we see here they've really helped us identify
what jobs each individual dog might be best at. So if you have a group of puppy dogs that you're training to work and
let me just start out by saying believe it or not dogs have more jobs than ever
now, they're very busy people, and just like if you have a group of
undergraduates who you don't know what they're actually going to end up
majoring in, and what major they should major in, and what would be best for them
when they come in as your student. It's the same with these cute little puppies
up here, they all have different cognitive profiles I would suggest to
you, and the question is which cognitive profile is best for which job because it
ends up because dogs have all these different jobs well they're different
things that they need to be able to do at all of these different jobs so how do
you know which dog is the right dog for the different jobs they are asked to do?
So whether it's being a pet, or finding IEDs, or helping a child as a therapy dog,
or being a service dog for somebody who's wheelchair-bound. So that's our
challenge and what we found with the little games that we play and we play
dozens of them and looked at individual differences is that the games that we
that game that I just showed you it really helped discriminate between dogs
that would be excellent bomb detecting dogs and dogs that would be really
helpful at helping those with mental and physical disabilities. So you can imagine
the first dog that's trying to solve the on its own probably not the person
you're the dog you're gonna put with a person with disabilities. The second dog
is fantastic communicative very attentive worried trying to figure out
what what the human could do with them together and cooperate. So it ends up
that these little games are very it ends up not just we we don't just find a
correlation, we did we did find correlations with these different games
with performance, but then we went back and tried to predict which dogs would be
best at which dog which job each different job and we were able to
predict with higher accuracy which dogs would be better at what job. So how did
we do this? How did we end up with this little game where we put food in a box?
It's ridiculous, of course, we were embarrassed to say that this is what we
were doing when we explained to our colleagues that you know we were going
to spend weeks and use tons of their time to put food in a box they think
we're ridiculous. Well, the reason that we got there and
the reason that we were able to stand up and you know say that this is really
important to do is because we were using an evolutionary approach to cognitive
abilities and the idea is that each species is different they have different
cognitive abilities and that there are different cognitive abilities that vary
independently within species and across species. So this is a very different way
to view the world then there's some general principle like learning ability
or you know the ability to solve problems some general principle really
the idea is there's different types of cognition it varies independently you
can measure it and it predicts what different animals might be good at. So
take for instance the species up on this slide I get this I get asked this
question by people in the media all the time which species is smarter tell me is
it cat or dog in the war tell me are cats or dogs the smart ones
and so they really frustrate people in the media because I refuse to answer
their question and what I always respond is asking me that is like asking me
which is a better tool a hammer or a screwdriver am I hammering or am I
screwing in a screw? Because the minds of animals are designed the exact same way,
there does they have evolved to solve the problems to be really really good at
solving the problems that they need to solve in the ecologies that they evolved
within and so if we want understand how cognition is interacting
with the environment and how best to utilize that cognition or to take care
of that cognition in the case of welfare then appreciating that cognition evolves
I think is a very powerful way forward. So for instance all these species up
here you might think well what in the world could the fish possibly be on that
slide for of course the fish isn't particularly smart what about the birds
well if I just sort of say the highlights of all these different
species each of these species have an incredible unique capability and there
are others as well and each of them could outperform all the other species
on this slide if you were to give them the task or the problem that they are
designed and evolved to solve in a flexible spontaneous manner. So thinking
about the evolution of cognition I would submit to you is a very powerful way to
solve problems okay so the challenge that we have here and I think our
hypothesis is that happier animals are going to lead to better transitional
translational science and I've given you the first example, I think, is that we
were tasked by the Office of Naval Research to help them select better dogs
we were tasked by the National Institute of Health helped us select better dogs
and by using evolution we were able to do that we came up with our silly little
task to put food in a box and all the others so I want to tell you a little
bit about the story of how that happened. Okay but before I do I want to introduce
you in case you have never heard of Niko Tinbergen the Nobel Laureate in ethology
because really when I'm talking about an evolutionary approach to behavior I'm
talking about Niko Tinbergen four levels of analysis. I don't think we can make
progress for instance with social housing if we don't consider a species
phylogeny, if we don't consider there are ontogeny, and if we don't think about
functional explanations for mechanism I think that function often will help us
predict what mechanisms that we want to understand better. So taking an account
phylogeny, ontogeny, function approximate to understand proximate mechanisms is
going to be a theme throughout everything you're gonna see I'm not
going to highlight every time I talk about or you
these things but I hope what you'll note is throughout all the things that I'm
gonna present today wow I'm really bouncing between these different levels
of explanation I'm not just focused on mechanism I appreciate that to
understand whatever mechanism it is I must take into account these other
levels of analyses. Okay and the prediction that I would submit to you is
that if we want happier animals and better translational science that really
taking the evolutionary approach that I'm gonna try to outline for you today
is gonna be the most powerful tool to improving welfare. And of course what am
I talking about, obviously, I think that the core of everything that we hope to
accomplish as the community is highlighted by the 3R's and they're
defined here I just grabbed this actually I just googled you know the 3R's and this came up which was kind of cool that it was there and available and
these are the definitions that were on somebody slide deck that I stole off
Google sorry whoever it is but the reason I did it is I wanted to remind my
own I want to remember myself well how is it that people think about the 3 R's
and actually when I looked at these definitions I thought man I thought I
was doing the 3R's but I don't really think that I fit this definition and I
think it's important for the rest of our time together because in some ways I'm
sort of an odd fit for the goals here because I actually don't have any
animals in a laboratory that I study everything that I do are animals that
somebody else owns and so I'm always joke that I'm the ultimate mooch if you
have animals I might have a conversation with you. And so what I would do is I
would say this is how I've approached the 3R's, it's slightly different and
I'm not suggesting that that's gonna be appropriate for those of you doing work
with laboratory animals, but I just want to tell you that this is what I came up
with is wow if I'm gonna meet the the 3R's and for
the goals of my non-invasive research I actually don't want a controlled
environment I want the animals I'm working with in
the richest possible environment, I want them to be in an environment as close to
what they might experience in nature as possible, because I want them to show the
most sophisticated cognitive abilities that they could possibly demonstrate
otherwise I won't be able to test the hypotheses I'm interested in in
a powerful way. So I don't want them in laboratories number one, number two is
for the purposes of what I do there wasn't that much funding for laboratory
work, and then number three is a lot of the questions that I want to add and
that I wanted to answer it just wouldn't be possible to to work in a laboratory
to answer them. So this was the sort of 3R approach I came up with
and as a first example of this I want to introduce you to the approach we
developed at the Duke Canine Cognition Center.
So at Duke, Nate already told me he's buddies with Ron Banks and you
could imagine I show up as an Assistant Professor at Duke University and you
know I have my first meeting with Ron and Ron was in charge of the IACUC committee
and OLAW and all that stuff and he says well Dr. Hare I got this email here that
you want to study people's pets, pet dogs, we don't you know we don't have a way to
deal with that with our normal procedures but you know it seems like
this is something that could be important so I'm gonna I want to work
with you. And it was amazing, he was genius and came up with a way a
workaround so that Duke could feel comfortable the IACUC committee
could feel comfortable, OLAW could feel comfortable, with me inviting people in
the community to bring their pet dogs to the Duke Canine Cognition Center which
is only called a center because people probably didn't want to bring their dogs
to the Duke Canine Cognition Laboratory. And so we have 1,500 pet owners in the
Triangle area that bring their pet dogs and in the beginning I thought well this
might work once you know maybe they'll bring their dogs one time and we won't
ask that much the first time and it ends up that we have a 99% success rate if we
call one of our people and say can you bring your dog on X date and we find a
good time for them they come and they show up. This is based on the
developmental psychology model and in developmental psychology where you
invite people's children to come in your success rate is around 25 percent have a
having two young children I completely understand that it's like sure I'll be
there yeah I'll bring my kid no problem you know baby but when you have dog
owner it's they're so enthusiastic and they so
badly want to participate that we have never had a problem so I've never paid a
vet bill, I've never had to pay for food, I've never had to pay for anything for
these animals and I have the largest population of captive dogs to study at
any university when we start. So that was the model and now we're we've invited
different people now seven eight times to participate people keep coming back
unless their dog and unless their dog dies were in great shape. So it's been
really exciting to see the enthusiasm of the local community. Okay so how did in
the world did I forget started studying dogs? Well, the answer is I was really
interested I was a student of Mike Tomasello I actually went to Emory
University and I met and I've took classes with Franz Duvall here as well
and I started out at at Yerkes studying chimpanzees and what we were doing was
we were trying to test the idea that human cognition the unique feature of
human cognition that develops very early in our lives is our ability to
understand gestural communication that when we gesture and we try to tell young
children or children start to gesture to us or start co-orienting when I gaze you
might follow my gaze that these at around nine to twelve months when they
first start to appear are sort of revolutionary moments in the development
of human social cognition that indicate that young children are starting to
participate in culture and that if you want to learn language these skills have
to develop. Okay so that's an incredible hypothesis I'm 19 years old and
somebody's telling me that little kids are a window into understanding our
evolutionary history and sort of what is unique and special about our species
relative to other animals. Man alright so Mike Thomas has to go out to
Yerkes I want you to work with Joseph Call and you're gonna sit in front of
some of the chimpanzees and you're just gonna hide food and then tell them where
you hid it and that's the game you're gonna play. You're gonna hide food and
one or two places and you're gonna sort of gesture point look move towards
wherever the food's hidden. Oh my god they're terrible bless Tye's heart,
bless Erika's heart, you'll meet them hopefully some of them Donna others at
the field station. Oh they were terrible at this, they are
brilliant in so many ways, but this was really really difficult for them.
So Mike Tomasello just told me the story that I told you and he said wow you know
we're finding the chimpanzees are as smart as they are at so many other
things they really aren't very good at this gestural communication stuff so now
I know that this is completely unique to our species and it must be really
important in human evolution. Well I grew up in Atlanta and this was my pet
dog growing up Oreo and I said to Mike I think my dog can do this, I think my dog
can do that, I think my dog could use gestures because growing up just down
the street with this guy he wasn't different than any other Labrador
Retriever he was obsessed with playing fetch just like every Labrador Retriever
is but he did one funny thing is he did like to have two tennis balls or three
tennis balls at all times which he would cover in massive amounts of slobber and
so then you would throw them those big slobbery balls oft in the distance but
the thing is when he came back with the first one he wasn't happy for you to
then throw the second of the the same ball again he wanted to find the second
ball okay. So he'd come back with the first one and
then he would drop it and he would start barking incessantly until you gestured
in the direction that the second ball had been thrown. So then he would run off
in orbit in that direction. So I just grew up I was I mean I was trained by
this dog this is what dogs do it never occurred to me that this was in any way
special or interesting. As Mike Tomaseelo said this is completely unique to humans and I say no I think my dog
can do this. So Mike being a great scientist at first
says well you know everybody says the dog can do calculus and I said oh no no
no really really really am I talking did I tell the story I just told you and he
says what you see really serious so this is a great moment in science where I
learned what science is he said I will help you figure out how to prove me
wrong and now let's do an experiment, and we did and we did a whole series of
experiments and it ends up that Oreo the pet dog that I tested and started all
this stuff in a garage in Atlanta and my parents garage we found out dogs are
really good at this and it's not a silly parlor trick it's not like it's
something they do and flexibly they've learned it seems that they understand
how we're gesturing to them and they pass all the same kind of
that we give young children and attribute an understanding of community
could have intentioned to them they're passing all the same games that we
couldn't even try with the chimps at Yerkes because they couldn't even pass
the most basic things in this area. Okay so here's an example of what it looks
like this is a Fifi this is actually in Leipzig Germany Fifi is just looking for
the grape there's the grape there it's like an RO1
grant for her get it got to get it and I'm just gonna tell her where it is
there it is and branch she chooses the wrong one scratch their head is so hard
and confusing and if you play this game over and over and over you to predict it
they would get better right they would sort of slowly go above chance even they
could slowly learn this I mean you're talking hundreds of trials before they
start performing above chance and it's simply because and we'll get there that
it really is all about the context. So here is the silly mutt in Germany again
never seen this game before play the exact same game and you'll see the dogs
and say well why didn't you just hand it to me.
And what we found was that when we compared a group of dogs to a group of
chimpanzees we use this novel cue putting the block on top because the
idea is this is something they've never seen before
we can control for things like olfaction it's not that the dogs just
smell where the food is it's also not that the dogs are just using your motion
they really do seem to understand even though they've never seen this arbitrary
novel cue oh you're just trying to tell me where it is okay sure I can use that
and they'll do it on trial one no problem. So it ends up if this was a big
thing in the news when it came out oh dogs are smarter than chimpanzees okay
which of course you know as somebody who just presented to you the cognitive
approach to cognition a hammer and screwdriver it was sort of depressing
that that was the headline you know because yes if it was chimpanzees or our
dogs are smarter than chimpanzees when it comes to communicating with humans
I'd have been happy with that because of course chimpanzees in many ways can run
circles around dogs. Alright, so subsequently since we
published this first finding we got we said well is this really true let's go
big with this because if it is true it could be really useful and important
not only in a basic sense to test evolutionary ideas but also on a more
apply to sense. So what we did is we tested hundreds of kids we tested
hundreds of dogs and we tested over a hundred chimpanzees that were totally
novel to all the cognitive testing are such sorry naive to the cognitive
testing and we tested them on over two dozen cognitive a set of over 2,000
cognitive measures and the idea here is that really if the social communicative
stuff is somehow unique and special to dogs well it should be that those games
are where dogs are really different and maybe even more similar to human infants
than other things let's say like spatial memory or inhibitory control in in those
domains and the non social things well dogs probably aren't very different than
your general your you know many other mammals if this really is that the
social cognition in dogs is somehow unique and special. Ok so we threw the
kitchen sink at it we came up with as many games as we could to measure a
variety of cognitive abilities but interestingly what what we did is four
of the social games that we tested across these three species and four of
the non social tests we're exactly the same for dog, human, chimpanzee. Okay and
this is what we found when we looked at all these different species performance
on all these different cognitive measures well it ends up that if it's if
you need to know directions or you want to understand something like gravity or
connectivity don't ask your dog please don't ask your dog your dog doesn't have
a clue anything that has to do with the physical world dogs are completely lost
okay but where there genius the one species that is most similar to two and
a half year old children when it comes to using gestural communication
understanding communicative intention and knowing how to understand others if
the other is a human it's a dog dogs are genius and what makes them remarkable
relative to other species is their ability to communicate with humans. Well
in some sense it's like I'm sure many of you live with dogs is like yes we knew
that okay but the neat thing is the comparison to different species. Okay so
let's continue that comparison and not look at just mean performance of a
group of dogs versus a group of other species what about individual
differences I promise you we talk about individual differences so this is like a
phylogeny of the relationship of performance across these eight tasks
that I told you that were the same across the three different species and
what I want you to think about is in math class they would say you were good
at math if they could give you one equation and you could solve it and that
would then predict that you could solve all the other equations that they might
give you okay and if you were good at English
they said write an essay about Shakespeare and that meant who you could
really really write a good essay about another author that they wanted you to
write about okay so writing one good essay would predict that you could write
a good another good essay but writing about Shakespeare doesn't predict what
you would do on those equations and being able to solve the equation
wouldn't be able to predict what you would do on the essays that's the idea
that there are these different domains of cognition that there really is
something called English ability and math ability so what we're looking at in
the case of these animals compared to kids is social skill versus non social
skill and the prediction is if these things really are different as I
suggested to you in the beginning that they should actually correlate to one
another in terms of performance the social measures if you're good at one of
the social measures that should be related to your performance on all the
other social measures if you're good at the non social measures that should be
related to your performance on all the non social measures and actually the
truth the the relationship is true if you actually do badly on one you should
do badly on the others. Okay so this is what we find with the human kids that
human kids that do really well on some of the social measures in orange well
they do well on the social measures on the other social measures and same for
non social what happens when we look at chimpanzees well it ends up that these
things aren't related it does seem in the case of chimpanzees
that they're probably using some general purpose mechanism to try to solve the
social problems and the the indiv the pattern of individual differences
between human infant and chimpanzee really looks different here so that's
really interesting and that does replicate a larger effort we we made
comparing chimps and humans. What about dogs? Well when we looked at dogs dogs
actually have an even more pronounced a relationship between these different
domains of cognition so if you were to ask me named a nonhuman species that is
most like humans when it comes to the cognitive skills that allow for language
and culture I would say a dog I would not say a chimpanzee or a primate it's
actually a dog the dog dogs have skills that we think are crucial for developing
language and culture it just happens there in a canine mind not in a primate
brain. So that's convergent convergence in
terms of psychology potentially is what I'm suggesting to you but what I want to
now turn to is the idea that it's not just convergence in psychology by
accident its convergence through evolution and that actually it's the
process of domestication that led to the patterns who we see here. Okay so we
tested wolves and we tested young dog puppies and it ends up the relationships
that I just explained to you hold so wolves look like chimpanzees when we
play these types of games and young dog puppies actually are very skilled even
at as young at six to nine weeks old they're just as skilled as adult dogs at
solving many of the basic social tasks we're talking about. So that was a big
surprise that's not what we thought, we thought that you really have to train
dogs to be able to use the social gestures and really do a lot of
repetitive training. It ends up young dogs young dog puppies with very little
exposure to humans are very good at understanding of reading humans early
emerging set of skills in dogs. Okay so we suggested that this was a result of
domestication this this cognitive profile but how would you test that
short of grabbing up a bunch of wolves and starting breeding them selectively
and what you know how would we answer it and then what would we breed them for
what would we be selecting on on what basis well thankfully just by traveling
to Siberia which I did I got to work with Dmitry Belyayev's experimentally
domesticated foxes on the fox farm run by the institution Institute of
Psychology and Genetics and what they selected for over 60 years
friendliness. So if foxes were friendly in the experimental population they bred
them together and they allowed them to have puppies. So 1% of each generation
was allowed to have puppies and that was based on a very standardized test where
literally they just went in for what the reaction of the fox was to the human you
can imagine doing this with the rhesus macaque it might take a while and so
they started with a wild population actually a wild population of foxes and
so after 60 years they have effectively experimentally domesticated the
population of foxes and the reason that they know this is because they
brilliantly kept a line as a control that they bred randomly for how they
respond to humans and when you compare the experimental line to the control
line and the two populations were kept in absolutely identical situation in
terms of their care and what they ate etc what you see is not only the
predicted changes in friendliness towards people but you also see a set of
morphological changes you see a set of physiological changes and you also see
changes in how they breed and their reproductive behavior so it ends up that
the this is the breeding season for the experimental line and this is the
breeding season for the control line. So instead of being able to reproduce for
six weeks they can now reproduce for six months and their development is
different as well they have an expanded window of development in the control
versus in the experimental line so you can socialize the experimental line
earlier you can socialize them longer to human contact and there are all sorts of other
patterns and development where you see expanded windows of development none of
these things were selected they selected for none of these traits they all came
along as byproducts of selection for friendliness
and there's a question as to what the mechanism might be one one idea is that
it's pleiotropic but it's a developmental story early in the
development of the neural crest as stem cells are migrating throughout the body
and there being there's induction as these cells travel throughout the body
stem cell stem cells that emanate from the neural crest are involved in
melanocytes development in development of cartilage bone and also the HPA axis
as well and so if you want to down regulate the HPA axis well you're
actually by actually gonna affect all these other traits because they're
developmentally linked due to the neural crest it's a hypothesis there might be
other good ones but the phenomenon that needs to be explained is real and and I
think very exciting. But I study cognition, so what did I do with the
wolves well we did I'm sorry I this is a video of wolves but what did we do with
the foxes well what we did with the foxes was exactly what we did here with
these wolves we just gave one of our little simple little social cue tests
actually we gave a series of them here's an example of one of them with a wolf
pup this is a wolf pup in Minnesota there's a sanctuary of about 70 wolves
up there and every summer they tend to have a few litters so we go and study
the wolves there it's always difficult to get students, it involves
bottle-feeding wolves for weeks by the way before you even get to this moment.
So here's the data and remember Tinbergen I thinking about
ontogeny, phylogeny and function I think we've got it all covered on this one
slide so looking at young fox pups and here your experimental foxes and control
and here your dogs and your wolves what I would submit to you is we have
evidence for convergent cognitive evolution as a result of domestication
and basically by selecting the foxes to be friendly you changed how the foxes
viewed humans they no longer viewed them as predators or something to be feared
something to be worried about but they actually viewed the foxes are sorry they
viewed humans as social partners, as someone to be attracted to, someone to
interact with and I can tell you having hung out with the foxes they want to
jump in your arms and that is what they want in their life it is what they are
motivated for and they are so excited and if you pick one up it's so wonderful
and they hug you and they they chirp and they make these little sounds even as
adults that they make when they're puppies and it's quite endearing
except for then they pee for joy all over you and they have musk glands and you smell like
you've been loved by a fox. So anyway especially if you have to
repeat this process many times. So the idea is after controlling for
development looking at an experimental selection of friendliness what you see
is if you want a clever fox and actually this is not what I predicted the result
would be if you want a clever fox you don't select for cleverness you select
for friendliness and you get a socially clever fox as a result just like floppy
ears and curly tails are a byproduct of selection against aggression so - it
seems social cognition is a byproduct of social of selection for friendliness.
Okay and the idea is that if you want to explain dog domestication Belyaev has
given us the most beautiful model to do so and it's very very clear now what
domestication is, domestication is selection for friendliness towards
people, and selection against fear and aggression towards people. Hmm so I
submit to you that this could be relevant now to thinking about social
housing and welfare. One of the other thing that's really interesting that's
been discovered just this year is that I'm sure many of you have been in this
situation before where the dog is staring at you and you're like what what
do you want no you can't have my food or whatever and so one of the really
exciting findings is and of course many of you probably if I asked you do you
love your dog you say of course I love my dog I love my dog and we might have
horrible philosophical debates about you know kind of dog love us but nobody
would probably want to have the same debate with anybody about whether they
love their dog because they might get in trouble and so what I can tell you is
that the physiological response that we see or observed between parent and
offspring it's also occurring between dog and human. Just this a couple years
ago there was and there was sort of the final cherry on top of the cake
showing that there seems to be an oxytocin loop between human and dog that
when you're making eye contact or you're petting your dog it's creating oxytocin
and you it's creating oxytocin and the dog and the bond and the love that
you're feeling it's real there's a physiological explanation for why we
care so much about our dogs and what I what was also really interesting is that
doesn't exist in human wolf's interactions when wolves are raised by
people even for their entire life you do not get the oxytocin loop it does seem
that this is a product of domestication. Now we haven't tested in the foxes would
that be great but the prediction would be that probably the experimental foxes
would show something more like what dogs show. Alright so because of this work
that I just presented to you we suggested the self domestication
hypothesis and I think thankfully I'm not gonna tell you about how I think it
helps explain many different evolutionary events but the idea is that
selecting for friendliness yes that's artificial selection in the case of the
foxes but if you're telling me that all domestication is is selection for
friendliness interacting with people or maybe even selection for friendliness
interacting with con-specifics well that opens the door for natural selection,
that perhaps selection for friendliness is a process that's occurred through
natural selection and we've gone and compared lots of different species and
tried to think about is the same process we've seen in the foxes can we observe
it in other places in nature so everything from bonobos to our own
species even this is the deer that lives in my neighborhood and I would submit to
you that it's not chance that we have a extremely rare albino deer walking up
our driveway and eating your azaleas. Okay because I think it's the process of
self domestication. Okay and let's just do this with dogs though really quickly.
Here I am with a group of wolf pups these are all wolf pups that have been
raised by people they're very familiar with people they were taken away from
their moms very very early and they want nothing to do with me the only reason
they approach is you can't really see it but there's kibble all across the ground
that they they're actually not interested in approaching me they just
are trying to get close enough to get the kibble. Again, these are wolves raised
by people but they want nothing to do with a strange human, meanwhile, to get
the photo there was actually a dog in here and it was running around and we
had to have wait to take the photo till the dog was out of the photo because I
wouldn't be as cool you know I haven't I haven't met the dog I mean the dog is
that I you know I don't know this dog so the the point is that dogs love people
they're attracted they want to be with us they actually prefer us and the
thinking goes sorry with the self domestication hypothesis for dog
evolution is that there's individual variability of 40 to 50 thousand years
ago when we know dogs started to evolved from wolves and think now forty to fifty
thousand years ago there's no agriculture okay this is way before
agriculture so how did this interaction happen and how did wolves evolve forty
to fifty thousand years ago when we know from genetic comparisons this is when
the population started to verge. Well the idea goes there's individual variability
as humans become more sedentary forty within starting around forty thousand
years ago we do what we do best we created a lot of garbage and guess what
human garbage is fantastic if you are a population of wolves that is not fearful
and is potentially or sorry if you're individuals who are not fearful and
you're attracted to humans more than your other wolf brethren. So the idea
would be if you could take an advantage of all the new garbage you have this
amazing resource a new ecological niche to exploit there's one thing you need
you need to be friendly and non aggressive and attracted to people so
that kick starts the evolutionary process and I could I would love to tell
you more about this idea but the punchline is you end up with these
animals as a result of natural selection. Humans didn't wake up one day and say oh
you know it'd be great let's go catch some wolves and while we're hunting and
gathering forty thousand years ago let's leave them with our kids well they'll be
great isn't a great idea and then we'll get twice as much food today so we can
also feed the wolves you know no that's not what happened.
I think wolves chose us and they wouldn't go away and as a result of a
natural process they were self selected and they were domesticated through a
process that Belyaev brilliantly together with ??? has
elucidated for us. So if you want to understand how this has to do with human
evolution what this has to do with the evolution of even bonobos and dogs
I wrote a review for the Annual Review of Psychology that just came out this year
I would invite you to go enjoy it. But, what I want to turn to now is I want to
say okay I told you the dog story and the evolutionary story and I want to
remind you how we started because how we started is how I finished I didn't start
with the cute little game and the food in the box I started with what I just
told you we did really great evolutionary work and detective work
trying to figure out what makes a dog special and remarkable and how have they
done this incredible trick to evolve from wolf the dog and be successful and
live on every continent with us and have us love and adore them
and the answer is they've evolved not just in terms of their morphology and
behavior but also their cognition they have converged with how our own
cognition works. Okay so given that and given the model that we use testing
people's pet dogs and other working dogs I want to take take you out and just
show you well okay that's great you know it worked for you what about other
people and it's catching on so there are now six universities and that I
highlighted in this slide but there's actually many more I could have put up
here and I actually would submit to you that the dog is going to save
comparative psychology because it puts comparative psychology work in a very
unique place where I think most science would like to be instead of being you
cost a lot of money and maybe or maybe not there's a lot of money for your
research we are extremely cheap, we cost almost nothing, and we can bring in a lot
of money. So universities like that and so we've been very successful at
bringing in money except for we have almost no overhead by studying people's
pets. Okay so that's why I think we're you're gonna see a lot more canine
cognition centers in the United States which is really exciting and think about
it because the challenges we have with say primates and I love and I'm gonna
tell you about my love of great apes in a second I love great apes but the
challenge there is for in since I study bonobos in Congo well
guess what I am the only person that necessarily has access at any time to
the world's largest population of bonobos I have 70 bonobos I can work
with no one else has 70 bonobos they can work with so has anybody ever gonna
replicate anything I do so it's actually quite depressing from a scientific
perspective I want people to be able to replicate my work potentially falsify it
and move things forward so we reveal the truth, dogs don't have that problem. Also
it's wonderful when you're piloting you no longer have to worry about well I
only have six Apes I can do this with so I feel really careful as I'm piloting
that I don't burn one of my subjects with dogs yeah whatever just pilot
doesn't matter if you mess up we'll get more so it's so nice . Okay and remember
we play fun games and this is to emphasize that so the thought occurred
well wait a second given there 1500 people in the Triangle
area they'd like to do this why are we keeping this to ourselves
I mean these you know not all science is rocket science maybe we could use this
as a real opportunity to educate people about what science is and what if we
could get people to collect data for us and pay us for it.
So we said why not let's try so we came up with the concept of dognition and the
idea is let's get people to play cognitive games with their dogs will
provide video instruction of how to do it and you can go to dogmission.com
right now and check it out you can play with your dog if you want it cost 20
bucks it is a company and it is for-profit but the idea is that we
provide games that you can play you have a interface on your phone or your iPad
or whatever and you can tell us what your dog did as you play these games
of course we're collecting all the data and we have a huge database now of over
25,000 dogs that have played these games but at the same time you get a report
and it tells you how your dog performed on these different cognitive measures
compared to all the other dogs to play these games and the idea is to try to
help people understand that it's not that your dog is smart or not because
it's what people always say to me my dog is so dumb or my dog is so smart
and I always think in my head compared to what and and on what measure and so
that's what this solves is compared to other dogs across five different
measures of cognition you can see how your dog does
and what's interesting is of course there's many many different cognitive
profiles and people are always really surprised and excited to see how their
dogs do. So there's the selfish motivation to learn more about your dog
but at the same time you're being altruistic and providing a great service
to the community. We tested whether this data has anything to tell us because of
course the worry was could people really do these games at home and would it be
useful at all and I was ready to you know publish a paper and say no it's not
useful it's a great educational tool but we're not gonna be able to use the data
but when we did the analysis it ends up that really the citizen scientists
replicated all the main findings because all the games we use we're out of the
literature we didn't make them up we took games right out of the public
literature and provided them for people and we found beautiful evidence for
these different cognitive abilities and it was the first demonstration actually
that the cognitive abilities that I've pitched to you actually do really exist
in non-humans. So high-five for citizen science and deputizing all these people
it means we can answer a whole bunch of questions because we have large sample
sizes whether it's breed differences, diet, development, aging, how you train
your dog and then we can look across the world because we actually have data from
over of our twenty five thousand dogs 25% of those are actually from a
worldwide sample of from over 200 countries so are different regions. So
that's quite exciting and so what I'd submit to you is that studying dogs
really does meet my own criteria for the 3R's and I think it's a very powerful
model. So what I want to turn to next though is not everybody can study dogs
and now they're interested in dogs and of course and not just a non vasive
approach so what about great apes and what I want to or primates I should say
more general and other species as well. So let me just stop here and just check
on time how am i doing on time because I want to make sure 10 to 15 minutes no
problem ok so I have 10 to 15 minutes and what I want to do is introduce you
to where I study non-human primates and then I'm going to literally blast
through some of the findings like click-click click-click
and just tell you what they were and then I want to finally get to the end of
the talk we're going to talk about more what do we do with laboratory science
and how do we use an evolutionary approach in that way so forgive me for
going fast here but I just want to make sure I have enough time to cover the
meat. Alright so what's wrong with this video the first thing is it's gonna play
upside down which is quite entertaining I don't know why I've never seen this
before it's only unique to this room besides the fact that it's playing
upside down what's wrong with this video so you have my daughter playing with a
chimpanzee it's quite cute it looks like a modern facility if you can turn your
head upside down you'll see that well what's wrong with the video is it ends
up that this was in China and we went to the Beijing Zoo on purpose to visit
these chimpanzees because they were not only being used in entertainment but we
know that they were illegally exported using illegal Cite's permits from
western Africa and that there's been an epidemic where over 150 chimpanzees were
illegally exported we know now that it's far more than that and more places as
well and as you can see from this slide it's not just zoos that are doing this
or entertainment facilities it's also unfortunately there's a burgeoning pet
trade as well. So if you're worried about great apes survival this is really the
the big problem that needs to be solved because having a perceived market is bad
enough but actually having a real market is even worse apes are being sold for 50
to 300 thousand dollars to zoos to be exported directly out of Africa to the
Middle East in China. Okay so where do I work well I work with sanctuaries the
there are 19 sanctuaries in Africa that are on the frontlines of preventing the
illegal trade the illegal pet trade and bushmeat trade of great apes it means
that they provide lifetime care for hundreds of individuals all over Africa
I work at Lola ya Bonobo which I already mentioned they have the world's largest
population of bonobos unfortunately there are hundreds of infants in these
sanctuaries but if you happen to be me who I studied developmental psychology
that's wonderful because I have hundreds of ape infants and not just chimpanzee
infants and not just East African chimpanzees
but I have West and Central and I also have bonobo infants so I can do some
really nice comparisons that would be impossible otherwise and relevant to the
conference they all are socially housed and they live in beautiful forests like
this this is Lola ya Bonobo all the Apes I work with are in primary forest and
they experience a microcosm of what any ape would experience in the wild. They're
orphans unfortunately so they do get raised by people before they're
introduced their peer reared in a nursery group not unlike what used to
happen here at Yerkes and then they're introduced into social groups and these
large forests. This is actually one of my subjects so when I told you I want
ecological relevance I wasn't joking this is one of the guys that we get to
work with you know I think most vets would be really nervous about this but
he was fine. So they live in these really rich environments and they live in
really rich social environments. Okay so this is what they look like when they
come in and this is Lamella then this is Lamella a year later and this is
where Lamella is now Lamella started out at the sanctuary here in Kinshasa and
then she moved to Basankusu which I've had the pleasure of visiting in the
deepest darkest heart of Africa and there she is in the wild so the goal of
the sanctuary is to take these orphans rehabilitate them and then get them back
out into the wild which we've successfully done and we've actually of
the 15 bonobos we've released a 13 of them are still out there and doing great
we did lose two. But I'm a psychologist and interested in evolution I've become
interested in health as a result of my work within the sanctuaries and these
sanctuaries I'd submit to you have become really a fantastic resource for
anybody interested in non-invasive work with great apes or veterinary work. And
so I'm just want to roll through some of the discoveries we had just this is just
to say you can do the best science at these sanctuaries this was a study that
showed that social and non social cognition differed between great apes
and kids this was the first successful experiment studying chimpanzee
cooperation, this was the first developmental comparison of bonobos and
chimpanzees showing that the two species differ and how they develop if you're
interested in studying the development of spatial cognition don't choose
bonobos because it doesn't develop and there are other things as well that are
really interesting about the two species being very unique in terms of how they
develop. Now in relative to social housing this is probably the most
important finding so I'll spend an extra second on this one this was we
release chimpanzees and bonobos into an enclosure where there was food that they
could potentially share in anticipation of realizing that they might have to
share the food and knowing who they were going to be going into the room with we
were able to detect differences in how the two species respond to this social
stressor. So chimpanzees as you might predict these are all males by the way
they have no response to this situation in terms of their cortisol levels but
they do have a big uptake in their testosterone basically it seems like
they're getting primed for social competition. Bonobos who are nearly
genetically identical isn't a chimpanzee a chimpanzee the answer is no bonobos
have a huge cortisol spike before they go in to this situation, no testosterone
spike, again, these are all males. The same exact social context leads to a totally
different physiological response in the two species nearly identical. So you
might conclude oh my gosh but almost get really stressed out in social groups so
don't put them together and cortisol is such a great measure of social stress
kind of I mean I don't disagree that I mean used cortisol as a measure of
stress I don't disagree with that except for it ends up that bonobos when you put
them together never fight, share the food, and because
they have this big stress response they hug and have socio-sexual contact which
I then think releases a whole bunch of oxytocin reducing the cortisol and
prevents any aggression. So because we understand their social system in the
evolution of their social behavior we interpret this differently than we might
just by saying oh they have high cortisol they must be stressed. Actually,
this is a wonderful response, this is the correct
response, it's not the incorrect or bad response and you wouldn't want to keep
them in a non social environment as a result of this. Okay so I just present
that as a challenge to using our physiological measures. This is a paper
that came out in Nature this year I think it really challenges our idea
about energy budgets and humans basically humans have are where the
where the SUV of the ape world we use way more energy than other Apes I think
it has huge implications for how we think about obesity nobody had measured
total energy expenditure in great apes in comparison to hunter-gatherers and
modern humans and it totally destroys the idea that you know the more you
exercise the more the less you eat the more energy and calories you're gonna
burn it's not a trade-off model instead we're the high energy ape you'll have to
read the paper to understand what I'm talking about I apologize because I get
it got to get through but I just want to highlight that we're discovering big
things by using these sanctuaries. One health we're also doing health research
this is the demographic model that Lisa Faust at the Franklin Park Zoo helped us
with what we realized and we knew already was that when we lose animals as
to respiratory disease at Yerkes I know long struggles with the respiratory and
heart if animals die that's one of the big things for the great apes so, we see
the same thing in Africa so our question was could we do anything about it we
invited Chris Wood's and Annie Ramon to help us with sort of an epidemic
epidemiological assessment so we've done a longitudinal
set of health checks of both staff and our animals we also did what I think is
the first respiratory cluster study on non-human apes and sit you so we've
basically went in at any time any individual had respiratory symptoms we
measured them and we measured their nearest neighbors over a series of days
and got blood samples etc so we can now it just are our samples there at Duke
now and they've just begun investigating. Again, it's not just us lots of people
from lots of great places are using the sanctuaries now to study great apes on a
whole host of issues and I think they're really serious wonderful places. Okay so I
told you in the case of my work, non-invasive work, more or less
non-invasive work that's in the interest of the animals is either veterinary work
or sort of potentially enriching fun games how do you
3R's but I think in the case of laboratory I actually think these
definitions are the right definition how do we use the 3R's effectively what I'd
suggest to you is using Tinbergen approach I think we can translate and do
a better job making our animals happy and making better discoveries. So I think
thinking about wolves in relation to your laboratory dogs is going to be
important I think thinking about cavies as it relates to your guinea pigs or
whatever the wild progenitor of your domestics are is really really
important and also acknowledging the fact that your monkeys are wild they're
not domesticated is really super important and thinking about social
housing. Ok so I'm gonna skip these two slides but the but but the point was
just to say that by thinking about evolution and how these species evolved
we did a better job measuring their psychology where we were failing like in
that Cup test I did with Fifi to find sophistication when we took a Tim Bergen
approach and we took into account the fact that primates are so competitive we
started to see abilities that we didn't think existed but they exist in a
competitive context not in a cooperative communicative human centric context. So
all these things basically say that primates are sophisticated as you might
think they are they know what you can see in what you can't see and they are
paying attention to you when you're coming in and interacting with them. So
let me get specifically to welfare using Tinbergen though if you don't know the
work of Georgia Mason I definitely I definitely think you want to go check it
out I think she's probably a leader in welfare research and I love her approach
so this is just a pictograph of her study on mink she asked me what they
prefer they had to move a heavy door if they wanted more toys or they wanted to
go out into a bigger enclosure or if they wanted more food or if they just
wanted to hang out in water. Okay so if you had a human centric view you'd think
well jeez I probably won't space or toys or maybe I just want to sit around and
eat a lot of food well guess what she found the number one thing it's a
massive effect if you're a mink you want water, I don't care about food I'll move
a giant heavy door to get into water because they have evolved a
predisposition to really be attracted and enjoy water and they don't want more
toys as much as they want water you wouldn't have known that if you didn't
ask them. Another one of her beautiful studies this is looking at can you
predict or relate of the health of animals in captivity
based on their natural ecology so this is looking at home range size and
looking at infant mortality and also looking at stereotype frequency so if
you're the zoo the pacing right how often do animals and this was a zoo
this is looking at zoo animals and what she found was that animals with
large home ranges their infants don't do as well as captivity and they tend to
show a lot of these stereotyped behaviors. So there are ways to think
about how animals have been designed and understand how they might perform in
captivity. Finally, there's a new study just out this this week I threw this in
here because it has to do with social in meerkats it ends up meerkats at zoos if
they're in larger group sizes as zoo visitors appear and come and visit them
they show a lower stress response basically meerkats that are in smaller
groups of two or three are much more stressed out when they're in bigger
groups they're much more relaxed as zoo visitors are coming and they were able
to control for a lot of variables I thought that was really interesting
because I think it goes along with the idea that in many species and think
about a meerkat that suffers high predation you know having these giant
predator like things walking around staring at you all the time when we now
know animals are very sensitive to attention and we've got the nice
controlled studies to show that that's very stressful and yes I live in a
social group and I depend on my social group to reduce the chance I'll be
preyed on so I want to be in a bigger group. This is a slide I had to get to so
let me try to wrap up on this slide so think about wolves, cavies, and your
wild monkeys the difference really between them is your cavies, and your
dogs have both been domesticated and what I would submit to you as we saw in
Belyaev's experiment is that's a real biological genetic process they are
different and they evolved to be with people, our monkeys did not, primates did
not and so that's going to inform how we think about social housing all the
strategies we use and the policies we make and where we need to put the most
effort. So I just have some things that we worry about the effect of human
rearing human attention dominant strange fear of con-specifics strange
con-specifics of strange humans and then aversion attraction to
specific con-specifics. In dogs, what I would say is
pretty much all these things are not particularly stress inducing relative to
wolves and relative to other non domesticate animals but here's the
really important one for dogs there are beautiful studies showing that
if you give dogs the choice between being with other dogs or being with
people if they are socialized dogs they want to be with people. It's not
that they don't want to be with dogs if the choice is between nothing and a dog
I think they choose the dog but if you give them the choice between people and
other dogs they choose dogs. Wolves do not make that choice even socialized
wolves want to be with other other wolves they don't want to be with the
people that raise them. So dogs really are attracted to us they want to be with
us I think that's very very important. Guinea pigs I don't think that I think
they look very similar and probably many of our other domesticated animals you're
going to be talking about rabbits etc I think they probably are very similar
except for I don't think they have a preference for people necessarily. Now
when we go to our monkeys I think they really do look different I think that
probably the effect of human rearing is gonna be pretty negative in terms of
their ability to interact socially with others I don't think they like to be a
human attention I think they'd be just as happy if a human didn't show up that
day as long as they got fed and water obviously in the case of rhesus macaques
they have a very strict dominance hierarchy but I hope we all remember
that rhesus macaques are one macaque species. For instance, Tonkean macaques if
we had had the blessed accident of having Tonkean macaques as our chosen
model species wouldn't our lives be easier because they're sort of like the
bonobo of the macaque world and they like each other and they like to hang
out it's not that rhesus don't like each other but they're very you know tolerant
of one another. Rhesus macaques I think they're stressed
around strangers whether it's human strangers or it's strangers for another
group obviously they migrate or they immigrate when they are going through
puberty and that would be the time where they'd be interested in strangers at
that point in their life but past that they're pretty happy with their group
mates and they're not really that happy to interact with others they don't know.
Do they have a muted HPA axis as a result of domestication absolutely not
no these are wild animals and they're going to behave like wild animals even
though they've been around humans there lives. Okay so here's some strategies to
wrap up or some implications of thinking this way is that just particularly when
it comes to primates because I feel like this is where this approach really
delineates domesticated non-domesticated and primates in particular are a
challenge I think we all know that there's a whole day dedicated and it was
so great to see that that had been put together of how do we deal with the
challenge that primates present us since they're wild animals and here's some
ideas or here's some things that we need to think about. Mother reared infants
that's always going to be difficult care taken to reduce infanticide or and
removing members of matriline so if you have to remove a member of a
matriline you have a juvenile you want to bring up and you or you you have a
young male you want to bring up and put it in a lab situation well you might
have problems in their social group if you remove too many from any one matriline
in infants being injured or molested as a result of a shift in the
dominance hierarchy. Group housing with choice of social partner I think one of
the challenges for primates in particular is and I see that that's
going to be dealt with which is so what's so cool is how do you choose the
right partner for them I mean we have beautiful studies showing that
chimpanzees are fantastic at cooperating they can solve all these really
complicated cooperative problems as long as they're tolerant with their partner.
You can have chimpanzees that understand everything about cooperation they
understand how to solve it, that they need somebody, that they can negotiate,
they incredibly sophisticated I can turn off their cooperation like that all I do
is pair them with somebody they don't get along with totally falls apart in
fact they might even be aggressive with each other. So how would the scale of the
problem the number of individuals we have to take care of how can we identify
and come up with a way to select the right relationships where the the
animals are happy or happy as we can provide them with but they're not being
aggressive with each other and the staff doesn't go crazy dealing with the soap
opera of primate life. You know recognizing the social system and the
cognitive abilities rhesus macaques know when you're looking at them they know
what you don't know sorry they know yeah that's true they know what you don't
know they don't know that you know something false but they know when you
haven't means something for instance or you have
seen something and they know when you're looking at them and of course generally
rhesus are going to take that as a threat unlike more tolerant species. So that has
important implications for they need places to hide they need small
especially in small crowded enclosures they're gonna really need a place to get
away from each other when it at all possible and familiar caretakers if at
all possible and I know that it's really hard because there's turnover and staff
and you know we're talking about a very large scale problem here but when
possible you know if they know who they're working with it's gonna help and
integrations of new great new members obviously you need to be carefully
planned I think everybody here would know that but it's just to reemphasize
that strangers in in the primate world is a very very very scary thing
because it often leads to death. So what I'd like to suggest is I thought I in my
career I tried very hard to think about the 3R's as it applied to me it ended
up I had to kind of come up with my own definition and my own approach but
Tinbergen was incredibly powerful for me in solving real world problems that
people didn't think could be solved. Comparative psychology was declared dead.
I had people tell me that I should go into systems neuroscience and give up
your dream of what you were doing because there's just no way forward I
contest that I think we came up with some good alternatives and that in fact
our field will be healthier than ever and it was because we didn't give up and
we thought about how our animals would be happy and that then would turn into
translating our science into real-world solutions and I think using the 3R's
it'll help us here - thank you very much.
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