Research Shows How Dogs are Affected by Human Emotion

[caption id="attachment_13446" align="alignleft" width="515"] Author Jennifer Holland with her dog.[/caption]

Author Jennifer Holland joins host Laura Reeves to discuss her new book “Dog Smart: Life-Changing Lessons in Canine Intelligence.” This cutting-edge science narrative, chock-full of heartwarming case studies, is one woman’s quest to learn the true meaning of dog intelligence and how they are affected by human emotion.

Holland interviews trainers and handlers of various working dogs doing their jobs. She was led by a seeing eye dog through the streets of Manhattan and took a sleeve hit in a protection dog training demo.

“I have some video of it,” Holland said, “and my head just sort of flops around like a rag doll. And the dog did not want to let go. It took a little while to actually pry him off of me and I got a good bruise.

“But again, what I was trying to think about was how you train this animal that, here we've, you know, raised them to be sweet and loving animals. I was told training them to bite a person is a really hard thing to do because they don't necessarily want to do that.

“And so it has to be a game. It has to be a game for them. The sleeve is a sleeve. It's not a person and then to be able to train them to stop if they're in mid bite. And here they're getting that thrill and you have to tell them no, the bad guy has waved the white flag. It was remarkable to me that dog can stop and have that self control.”

Laura commented that the part of the book that really jumped out at her was research showing that puppies who were given unhappy or negative sweat smell grew up to be unhappy negative puppies. And the ones that were given a happy sweat smell grew into well-adjusted, happy dogs.

“(Dogs) are just so affected by us in that way,” Holland added. “Just the importance of our level of stress or for them the feeling that we're feeling good is important to how they respond and how they behave. It just shows that incredible kind of co-evolution that's happened and that bond that we have that really I think makes (dogs) particularly special.”