“Oreos were my best friend growing up,” says Brian Hare. Once Hare wanted to hone his baseball pitching skills, his Labrador eagerly took on fielding duties. If he decided to explore the nearby forest, Oreo was always happy to take him. But there was one place where the boy and the dog always parted ways. “Oreo has never set foot in our house. Not once,” Hare says.
Nowadays, the front door is not closed for most dogs in high-income countries, and many dogs spend their days relaxing on the couch or watching TV. You would think they would be in dog heaven. But Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, believes this development has put them in the doghouse. For thousands of years, he says, we’ve relied on dogs to protect our property and protect our families at night. Now, we have different expectations. Not only do you want your indoor dog to be friendly to strangers and rest quietly throughout the night, but you also want to make sure that your dog is potty trained, doesn’t chase other animals, and doesn’t get dirty paws on your upholstery. You also need to do so. “This is an evolutionary mismatch,” Hare says.
Fortunately, this problem is solvable. Many recent studies have shown that selective breeding and careful training can help dogs adapt to indoor life. Meanwhile, Hare and his team have set up a “puppy kindergarten” in the lab to dig into needed behaviors and shed new light on milestones in canine cognitive development. Even better, researchers have devised a technique…
(Tag to translate) Dog
