Vietnam: A Television History; Interview with George Cantero, 1981

We are inseparable best friends. Anywhere. She will certify. And they are smarter than we ever imagined. Astonishing new research is revealing that dogs are far more than merely contained while down. What makes our relationships a special ops ability to be able to read our emotions so you effectively have they evolved a new kind of intelligence. Suddenly there were dog students something that not even chimps could. Have dogs developed a language to communicate complex emotions anger or happiness despair. If you can oh my stump stand with. Think. Why do we love an animal that was once a fearsome predator. How did dogs go from this. Did this. Visit in the genes. For the way we treat them. And when did it all begin. The bones tell one story. We start seeing the first things twelve or thirteen thousand years ago. The genes tell another

100000 years or more the answer is more important. You might think. That our dog domestication civilization just would not let. Dogs decode it boy. Major funding for Nova is provided by the following. Breathe in. Breathe out. As volatile as markets have been lately. Having the security of a strong financial partner certainly much breathe easier. For more than 140. Pacific Life has helped millions of Americans will to secure financial future. Wouldn't it be nice to take a deep breath. And relax. Your financial professional can tell you about Pacific life. The

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All right there are more pet dogs than babies in the world. Nearly half a billion Boy that. We treat them as if they are fellow human beings with all of the thoughts feelings and emotions of a family member or group. Girl it's an incredibly close relationship. We share our lives our homes even our beds with them. We're very close. We're best friends. Didn't sleep with us. He loves being in the bed with his head on the pillow. It just seems to fit him. She is there with my slippers first thing in the morning. She's bought all the firewood she is the family. For decades science has dismissed dogs as being unworthy of legitimate study.

But all that has changed. Scientists are now attempting to understand dogs like never before. What kind of bond Do we not with can we each other's emotions. Are they smarter than we think. And how and when did this unique relationship develop. Now the dogs are all over the world. They're everywhere. Anywhere you find humans you will almost certainly find dogs now beginning to realize that we can answer certain questions in dogs that we can't really answer in any other spaces. There's been this explosion I don't research I think really because they are us specially tuned into humans and it's makes dogs extremely interesting. Here in England University of Lincoln Professor Daniel Mills specializes in veterinary behavioral medicine. He's using eye tracking technology. To

probe how close our relationship really has. So what we're trying to do here is see the world from Doc's perspective rather than just impose our own views as to how we think the dog sees the world. He's attempting to discover if dogs are is good reading our emotions. As their owners quite. He'll know. What I'm thinking even before it's turned into a thought bubble. He is clearly an animal. I accept that he's talking animal I'm no under any illusions that he isn't but he's more knowing than I would expect an animal to be able to look at me with sorrowful eyes and I quickly want a click on the hand as if to say it's all right. This is six cents a dogs have. One of the things that a lot of people comment on is that dogs seem to be naturally attuned to them and be able to sense their moods and whatever part of our work here is actually to look into the scientific basis of that.

The key to a dog's ability to read our emotions might lie and something we all do without knowing it. When we express our emotions in our faces we don't do it symmetrically. It's been shown that if you take somebody's face when they're expressing some emotion like happiness or anger or something like that there is a difference between the left and right side. Composite faces consisting of two right or two left sides look very different. One of the theories is that maybe our emotions are more 5 percent in the right side of our face and that's the side that we tune into when we look at the face we have what's known as a natural left gaze bias. So you naturally look much more towards the left i.e. the right hand side of somebodies face. Eye tracking software demonstrates that when presented with a human face we nearly always look left first. Then your MIL's wants to find out if dogs use the same trick to read human faces shifting the direction of your gaze.

We thought was fairly unique to people until we started looking at dogs. As a way. To test the theory. His team recreates this experiment with dogs. They present a series of images showing human faces dog faces and in animate objects and record the direction of a dog's gaze with a video camera. We found that the first one down looking at pictures of dog faces all objects. They will look randomly on the left side of the right. But when it comes to human faces they make a remarkable discovery. So now we have looking at a human face of looking in the middle of the screen. And here is the first I movements on the left. She's in the middle and she's going on the left. Now this is us. And then we can see really well that's this is a left is from here to here. We can see the white here. She's even moving her head.

Does this mean dogs can read human emotions. As far as we know no other animal has this relationship with the human face and dogs don't do this with each other. This suggests the dogs have acquired a new skill enabling them to communicate with us on an emotional level being able to detect when somebody is angry or potentially going to be harmful to them. You could understand that there may be a biological advantage in being able to read people's emotions and it really makes sense for a dog to approach somebody when they're smiling. If dogs can read human emotion and increasingly the scientific evidence is beginning to point in that direction that's going to form the basis of a right powerful bond between a human and dog. Evidence like this appears to underpin our conviction that dogs understand us in a way other animals cannot. But for many dog owners this unique relationship is much more than a one way street.

I like to think we can understand. Yes well if Sam Alito. Because he wants to be hospitalization if you boil it take it. I think you got what you want to go out. And I think you've got a bark when he has strange noises. Sometimes when he tells the kittens off he goes broke. If you're in a certain mindset you can. Almost understand what they're thinking. The idea that we can understand barking almost like a language has always been dismissed by scientists but in Hungary an experiment is underway looking for evidence to back up the claims made by dog owners. Here in Budapest as one of the world's first research facilities dedicated to the human dog relationship with a lot of Dr. Adam a close he wants to see if humans really can understand the barks of dogs. Today he's out on a field expedition collecting recordings.

Scientists are also saying that barking is noise without any specific informational content. However if you have a different idea might tell us something about the emotions anger fear happiness despair. So these are basic emotions which I think human might be able to recognize in the barking sound. To test this idea. Adam and his team act out a number of scenarios provoking dogs to bark and different ways. When other people listen to these recordings. Will they be able to match the bark to the emotion. Sounds like a dog asking for attention. I'm sure. It's size. Distrust.

I live. That life. For something. I want or toil something. Great. This is the sound that she would like if she saw somebody behind the fence for Canelo. Well. That's a stranger. I think it's a stranger encroaching on her truck. The results of my close E's research are remarkable. It shows a strong agreement between people about the meaning of different Barnett's.

Overwing the study you would say that our people can discriminate six parks and most of them for a quite successful in this. Doc in the close he has created a system to analyze the barks. It's helping him decode hound dogs communicate meaning. A measure of the features of the sound. One was the frequency the other was the tonality and the sword was the interval between the barking sounds and probably this is always a what the judgement of people is based of and they are describing the bark in terms of emotional content. But what's more surprising is not our ability to interpret the barks but what the barks reveal about dogs in the natural world. Dogs and wild relatives wolves only bark as a rule. Amazingly during the course of domestication dogs may have evolved their elaborate whole great repertoire especially to communicate with us at the basic level

everyone can do it. And there is a good chance that rocking is a very good means to communicate to humans. The evidence from these recent experiments seems to confirm what dog owners have asserted all along. The dogs and people are incredibly attuned to each other in a way that no other two species are. And new research techniques now allow us to study more precisely the nature of this bond. Some scientists believe that our interaction has a biochemical signature that may be similar to what happens between a mother and a baby. It's really hard to describe just an amazing feeling. In Sweden Professor Shuster no smoker has been studying the role of the hormone oxytocin in creating the bond between mothers and their newborn oxytocin is little little peptide hormone it's just nine

amino acids It's produced in a very old part of the brain called the hypothalamus and oxytocin helps the mother quickly establish the positive feelings and the bond to the baby each time a mother breast feeds. She has a new release of oxytocin which may reinforce the bond. It's sort of. In a way difficult to understand how you can be familiar with somebody who is actually a stranger so quickly don't you think. Professor Moberg believes oxytocin plays a similar role in the bond between dogs and their owners. To test the theory. Blood samples are taken from dogs and their owners before and during a petting session we had a basic blood sample and there was nothing. Then we had the sample taken at one minute and three minutes and you can see this beautiful peak of oxytocin. The fascinating thing is

actually the peak of oxytocin is similar to the one we see in breast feeding mothers. Surprisingly it's not just the owners who are affected. Blood samples taken from dogs reveal a similar burst of oxytocin. It is a mutual kind of interaction you know when it touches her with her hands and they both smell here and see each other. That. Is a very nice way to get back to tossing us into two of them. Oxytocin has a powerful physiological effect. It can lower the heart rate and blood pressure and may lead to reduced levels of stress. Research indicates that owning a dog could even extend your life. If you have a dog. You are much less likely to have a heart attack if you have an heart attack. Three to four times more likely to survive it. If you have a dog.

Than if you kept. Our relationship with dogs goes back thousands of years. So how did it begin. Where did the first dog come from. Darwin recognized our unique relationship with dogs but even he couldn't say for sure which animal was the true ancestor of today's dogs. It's a complex puzzle that both archaeologists and geneticists are working to song. There's a huge amount of variation in present day dollars consider the difference between a pickaninnies and the Great Dane. Could they really all be descended from one wild and sister. It could have been a coyote that may have entered Greste with a wolf and then that may have been slightly selected upon to create one particular breed of dog or jackals or African wild dogs or any number of these other dog like species that are out there must of somehow come together. And that's where the variation must come. Until the advent of genetics archaeology had few firm answers.

You have to play with are the bones. And so when you look at the bones if you don't have a very small flat faced round headed pug in the archaeological record you don't know where that came from. Those are questions that before genetics you really couldn't answer. To unravel the evolutionary origins of dogs geneticists compare DNA from dogs with that of their wild relatives. Specifically they look at mitochondrial DNA sequences which pass unchanged down the maternal line since mitochondrial DNA changes little over time. It can act as a kind of signature left by an animal's ancestors. Those markers in domestic dogs show them to be much more closely related to grey wolves than they are to any other species. There's no admixture so we never see a mitochondrial signature of say an African wild dog or jackal or coyote in a domestic dog. Of the thousands upon thousands of mitochondrial DNA has been extracted from domestic dogs every single one of them just looks

just like a grain. This controversy is settled. Dogs are domesticated wolves. But the mystery remains when and how did this change take place in what is clearly clearly a dog is something which is clearly not a wolf. He's a wolf skull and as you can see it's a long quite low skull with a relatively flat top teeth are quite large and the thing is quite narrow. Compare that with a domestic dog. This is a cairn terrier. And as you can see the process of domestication has gone really quite a long way. The whole face is very much shorter. It's been contracted to the brain case the brain case itself has a much steeper front and a much more bowed upper surface. So if you find that you'd be in no doubt you were dealing with a domestic dog. But this is a domestic Alsatian and telling these apart really would be substantially difficult.

And since early dogs were probably very wolf like it's hard to pinpoint when domestication happened by looking at the shape of the bones. The best I can give you is around twelve or thirteen thousand years ago. We start seeing the first things that everybody would accept as being the mystical But mitochondrial DNA offers a different set of clues. The original genetic tics that were coming out seem to suggest the domestication was happening on a far earlier time scale than was suggested by anything in the archaeological record. The first dates that were coming out were on the order of a hundred thousand years or more which a lot of archaeologists raise their eyebrows at. It's hotly debated exactly when dogs were domesticated but geneticists and archaeologists agree on one thing. Our relationship with dogs goes back thousands of years further than with any other pet. For me it was a time when we were still hunter gatherers.

If dogs were certainly the first adult to be domesticated and they fit into hunting and gathering societies probably better than any other species by this stage when were hunting and gathering and killing wild animals. After you finish with them you're creating a real deadly large pile of bone and leftover meat things that these wolves would have been very attracted to those wolves that were able to take advantage of that resource and were a little bit less afraid and could approach the human camp more than setting themselves up into a closer relationship with you because we are carnivores. We are social cannibals we hunt in groups and we hunt in daylight. There are many other species that do that. The wolf. Is a social call of all the pumps like they are and therefore I think there's a natural potential for teamwork between those two species. We became much better hunters with dogs. We are more successfully taking down large game which means we have more food to eat which means we can have more offspring which means the overall

populations of humans grow. Dog domestication may have helped pave the way for a fundamental change in human lifestyles. It's hard to see how early herders would have moved and protected and guarded their flocks without domestic dogs being in place. I want to wonder where the agriculture would ever really have made it as a viable alternative to hunting and gathering. Some believe that the influence of dogs on our development was not just important but pivotal. Dogs absolutely turn the tables. Without dogs humans would still be hunter gatherers. Without that initial starting phase of dog domestication civilization just would not have been possible. We look at our dogs and we see an intelligence and ability to interact with us unlike any other domesticated animal. But are dogs really that clever. Or are they just dumb animals taught to perform

tricks that mimic human behavior. I think she's very smart. She learns tricks fairly quickly. If I'm packing a suitcase I will go and sit in the scicos because then I that's a case is going to go somewhere while I'm talking to him most the time. He's still ahead usually to the side as if he knows what I'm saying. I do talk to her. And she picks up on what I say to her. I know it sounds stupid but I do actually have a conversation with my dog. So how does the intelligence of a dog compare in the animal kingdom. New research is discovering that in certain ways dogs may actually think more like us than any other animal including our nearest relative. The chimpanzee. All questions around the evolution of human cognition of cause people would focus in on chimps quite naturally and suddenly there were dogs doing something that not even chimps Katee. Cognitive psychologist Juliane Kaminski compares chimps with

dogs in a series of revealing experiments. At my pigs of humans he is testing chimps to see if they can understand human gestures like point. To find a hidden tree. As simple as it seems to us even our nearest primate relatives failed the task miserably. She's not focusing on me actually simply making how I'm choice most of the time. You can see that she makes a decision long before I give my gesture. She doesn't even wait for my information at such a corporate attractions. Like really I'm providing information far. To find food which is something something which should never happen in a chimp brain. I mean a chimp wouldn't go

like that another child could go and get it. Since we're the only species that makes this gesture you would be remarkable if any animal could understand. But dog owners take it for granted that their dogs respond to points. For Kaminsky. It's proof of their extraordinary social intelligence. If you really look at that gesture it's an. Informative. That's just such in its essence a very corporate interest. Since I'm helping you to find something. And the dogs following pointing seems to be very natural it's made stocks are extremely interesting. In fact dogs are so tuned into our social cues. They can even pick up on something as subtle as the direction of our gaze. Humans have a unique almond shaped on exposed whites Calero

visible on each side. One hypothesis is that we have all those eyes because we use it for communication so you can read it with human eyes you can really tell which. I'm looking. But these aren't skills dogs use with each other they are abilities. With us I think it's very easy to imagine that they developed special skills in interacting with humans because that's their new social partner. Kind of learn to interpret human communication which is different from dog communication. So they kind of learned a second language so you could probably say they are bilingual. Yes. Even puppies as young as six weeks old seem to respond to human gestures. At least some of the time. If they learned they learned very quickly and it's obviously that they're ready to do it so from the very beginning they're ready to receive human cation.

Dogs are primed to communicate with us. But just how smart are they. New research reveals their abilities extend way beyond what anyone thought. Professor Kaminski has discovered a remarkable border collie living in Austria just outside Vienna. She's conducted a series of experiments and is amazed at the dog's intelligence she can distinguish objects by name which is really amazing and she has like many many wides kids so. I. Just see her part. With a vocabulary of over three hundred forty words. Betsy is pushing the boundaries of what we think dogs are capable of. Corrupter. Sand Beach. Betsy's owner who prefers to remain anonymous explains how this all started. I think it was when she was four or five months old when she spontaneously

started to connect human births to i times when we were discussing shall we play with the rope or with the boy. She immediately started to bring those items so it was actually her idea. And from this time on we started to really train her on different verse. That was maybe one toy per week and it worked. I think an average of a well-trained dog maybe knows like 15 commands or something that just a very few individuals who can do what she does. I can tell it outright with my own dog and it didn't work at all so he could maybe distinguish two objects after a while and after extensive training. But she is really able to learn this easily and more than 300 objects that's pretty amazing. That's his understanding of vocabulary rivals that of a two year old so Kaminski wants to test her comprehension on other skills as well. Yeah. Two year olds are just beginning to understand how to use symbols such as scale models to represent something else. Though it looks

easy it requires abstract thinking way beyond the capacity of almost all animals. But would Betsy be able to do this to. Us. This was something the owners had never tried before so when I came in I said. I'm I want to do this they were really like oh no way that's not going to work. I was there is the first one doing it with her and she had no problem. I'm doing it right from the beginning. This is surprising because it has an essence of I hold out an object. She turns it into something communicative and that's so interesting. Children also begin to grasp that a drawing or photograph can depict a real object in its essence the picture as something very different as the object.

So it's a it's a piece of paper. But and it's two dimensional but it's really presenting something so she obviously interprets that as representing an object a three dimensional object. And that's interesting that she does this I know exactly what you've done. This is the one you want and I'm going to going to get it for you. God is. Right. Kaminski is unsure how many dogs might have similar abilities but Betsy has shown that certain dogs may have the potential to be more intelligent than we ever thought possible. So how did dogs acquire these unique abilities. Did these evolve over thousands of years. Or is it rather. The way dogs have been raised in a human environment. Dogs are rules are still the same species today. They can easily interbreed. Overall wolves and dogs are ninety nine

point eight percent genetically identical. Given that they're biologically so similar. Is it the way we raise them in our homes. That makes a dog. Researchers in Hungary set out to answer this question and we wanted to see whether the special relationship between humans and dogs are due to nature or nurture. So we wanted to see what happens if war is raised in a human and by a man in a home whether it would act like like a dog on Lost. A little a five day old cubs is taken from a wolf sanctuary outside Budapest. Several young researchers are their adoptive parents caring for them 24 hours a day. There's a control for the experiment. They already raised puppies. Now they aim to raise the wolf cups in the same way.

So Weaver is especially nice with without caps because we wanted to maintain a very good relationship. With them. They were really cute. So it was not very difficult to carry than it would there be. We were going there and we also slept together every day with that caps so the bonding. It was me. I really like my my cobs and there was a strong really strong relationship that in the eyes then something changed. Despite raising the Cubs in the same way as the puppies at 8 weeks differences start showing up. But these were always interested in what what I was doing. There is a very strong corporate thieves tendency in dogs and this was missing in the balls. They had their own ideas and they were not much interested in my activities.

The researchers want to find out exactly what is going on and decide to run a series of tests comparing the wolf cub with puppies of the same age. The puppies again. The war is done. Unlike dogs the Cubs do not respond to points. In fact they hardly makes eye contact with humans. The Cubs behave the same as they would in the hood. She was really processing if she wanted to grab an object. It was really difficult to get it back. And if we wanted to open the refuse Araik there and have breakfast.

The pup was immediately in the middle of the refuge right there and grabbed something. It is not like with a dog that you say no you shouldn't. It just didn't care. The battles worsened. After the second last. We started to have more and more conflict and the wolves wanted to destroy everything. And of course it was the Cubbies a small club. It's nothing. But when they reach 40 or 50 kilograms you know it starts to be really dangerous. We just could not keep them in the house. And the more. Who after four months the Cubs had to be returned to the reserve. The experiment shows that upbringing has little impact. It's impossible to turn a wolf into a dog no matter how much it is loved and nurtured. So according to my experience says the dog is not a socialized

at all. The difference is we experience in the quantity and in the social behavior of dogs. This is the effect of domestication. The differences must lie in the way dogs have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Their unique abilities are now part of their nature. But how did dogs evolve these innate attributes. Can we figure out what made them tame. A remarkable experiment in Siberia may hold the key to understanding how war has evolved into domesticated dogs. Half a century ago Soviet scientists set up a breeding program to see if they could domesticate Silver Foxes. Foxes are closely related towards. The project which is attracted the attention of scientists across the world is opening a remarkable window on the

process of domestication. Here on a farm outside the city of Novosibirsk the experiment still continues today overseen by Dr. Lee illiterate. The breeding program began in 1959 when the first foxes were selected from local for farms. It just isn't really you you you for the ACT so you know that we approach the animals in the cages. And he quoted their reaction to us you could see that some of the folks is show that risky behavior others were frightened but only a 1 percent of them showed Nye the science of the L at the Russian border. This one percent is selected to become the founding generation of a new population of foxes at every generation. The selection process is repeated. Only the tameness foxes are

allowed to breed. Within just three generations. The aggressive behavior begins to disappear. Rats I mean the radical changes in the eighth generation when folks are starting to use humans. And show affection that the amazing thing was that cups had just started to grow open back and let it show in effect by breathing wagging their tails and howling the higher you let them of this kind of response was a big surprise Chas. Half a century and nearly 50 generations later the foxes are tamer than ever. It's an accelerated model of how dogs might have been domesticated from wolves. In order to understand the role that genetics plays in the taming process.

The scientists also bred a group of. Candidates there you. Know. It just bit my hand. So I didn't give up on the King. I just put my hand up. And there by this was a bonus. But. This. Well this is the fox. It's a dragon. This experiment allows researchers to make you new comparisons between tame and aggressive. Justice you might. Revise your.

Opinion. We did an experiment with cross posting where we gave aggressive paths to thank us and vice versa. They found out that they must be hated does not in France that. The cap. Was brought about by a pay model. The results are clear. The difference between tame and aggressive foxes is almost entirely genetic. We want the big spin and once they have that and transplanted. Yes from aggressive not us into payment us but there was the same. It proved that you can change the engine of aggressiveness at will be kept and preserved for the next generation. Geneticists have already located several regions on the Fox genome responsible for tameness. They're now taking blood samples from tame

and aggressive foxes in an attempt to pinpoint the specific genes. Doctor and a cougar Cova the scientist leading this research team makes the 5000 mile journey to Siberia to study the Fox's hit is complex because the show it is filled with not a single gene is different is an orchestra of genes. Which is it is possible for his behavior. One fascinating result to come out of this experiment is the fact that tamer foxes are producing less adrenaline with lower adrenaline levels. The foxes experience less fear and are less aggressive. Yes like it like you don't hear like I think was very happy for me to pick him up from the floor. It's unbelievable how we can ask people to live in my youth anymore. If. I didn't.

Live. Within 50 years of our intensive selection process in this fire breathing dragon has turned into a human friend. If foxes will brought up into the mystic environment interact and visit any mouth. And humans. It would make fantastic paths. It's. Given us. They are as independent as paths but at the same time as devoted. As any of the could be. One surprising result of this experiment is that as the fox's behavior changes so does their physical appearance. Just a few generations into the experiment scientists noticed a curious phenomenon. The normal pattern and silver color of the cold changed dramatically in some of the tame foxes. Their tails often became curly instead of straight. Some young foxes kept their floppy ears for much longer than usual

and their limbs and tails generally became shorter than their wild counterparts. In effect. The Tain the Silver Foxes were beginning to look more. Like dogs. What this shows is that when you select against aggression you get almost all the same suite of changes that you see when you compare dogs to wolves. Evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare is visiting the breeding program in Siberia. He believes once you select for tameness changes in appearance will naturally follow. I think the surprise when I think about dog origins is that there are so many ways that dogs are different from wool. So is it that you had to select for each of these traits individually. Well the answer from the Fox work is no. If you just look for behavior a lot of the morphological and physiological changes that we see between wolves

and dogs they just get dragged along with this crazy variance. You know floppy ears curly tails you know all these other things that are really cute to talk about so you get a lot of stuff for free when you select against aggression. For hair this wide variety of physical traits reveals something fundamental about domestication. When you're selecting its aggression what you're doing is you're favoring juvenile traits juveniles and infants show much less aggression than adults. And so basically you froze in development at a much earlier stage. And so you have an animal as an adult that looks and behaves much more like a drug. It's amazing that you get all this variance that's hidden under the surface it starts to express itself. And then of course later people can directly decide I really like the one with the curly tail and I'm going to take two of them I'm going to put them together and then you can end up having dogs that you know sort of shift in ways that people want them to go.

In the past few hundred years we've taken dogs in from tile features and emphasize them even further through selective breeding. We've created hundreds of breeds to fulfil different roles but some of them have been bred purely for their looks. I think this kind of breeding really tells us a lot about what kind of people we are what it is that we like about dogs. I see. Thank you. Keith and your family. I just look at that and I just smile. Physically when she's sleeping she's very very cute. We all know we find them cute. But what is it exactly that makes us respond to dogs so powerfully. Psychiatrist Morton Kringle Bok has a theory as to why the way dogs look. Has such a profound impact

on us. The need to know Chai I think is something that is so deep in us that we find it very difficult to resist. Dogs puppies. Have very infinite like features. And. Maybe that's one of the reasons why we think there are you know so huge is that the reminders of the infants that we are so to speak program to like. There's something about the way that the facial features are organized that makes one to care for them. And it's about having a large forehead is about having large eyes big ears. And there's something about that that almost unconsciously we cannot help ourselves but actually like. Saying that. We're just going to go out one more scan. Doctor Kringle Bach is exploring how strongly we respond to these infant tile features. He uses an extremely powerful machine called a meg scanner that allows him to measure in real time the brain's

response to pictures. A baby an adult faces. What we found was that within a seventh of a second there was activity in the frontal part of the brain just of the eye probes in the orbital frontal cortex that was present when you were looking at the infant faces but not when you were looking at the adult faces. This part of the brain is very much involved in the emotional responses. And so what we think we may have stumbled across here is really in many ways the brain equivalent of the parental instinct there's almost like a wired in automatic reaction. Just as with the infant when you're looking at dogs you find it very hard to control your emotions you find it very hard not to get that need to nurture. Wow look at what a night that I. Was you and I are.

Still cute but when we treat dogs as if they were children do we sometimes allow them to replace our children. They are essentially moving our focus away from having children on to having pets. I think we can think of little puppies brought home as parasites they don't do anything useful they're not perceived as a food source they're not perceived as a guard dog. They are simply brought home for fun. The cook who is perhaps quite a good analogy because the baby Coco of course being planted in somebody else's nest prompts mother bird to look after baby cooking even though there's nothing in it for the mother but it all. I think is safe to say that dogs have evolutionary been very successful. If you compare them to rules you'll see that I also know an endangered species by dogs of course are all around the world. Whether they are viewed as parasites or beloved companions no one can deny the evolutionary success of the domesticated dog. In fact there are over 400 million worldwide and humans have

created over 400 genetically distinct breeds. Research on dogs is heading in exciting new directions. Geneticists have already mapped the genome of one breed the boxer studying this genome scientists now realize that it offers tremendous promise in curing human disease. Dr. Eleanor Carlson of The brode Institute was part of the team that mapped the boxer genome in 2005. He looked at in you know a population of humans you have quite a lot of genetic variation across them people would be quite different from one another but within a breed dogs are very similar to each other. Dr. Carlson believes that she can use that similarity to understand the genetics of human disease. I think there's hundreds of diseases that are in common between dogs and humans. There's diabetes there's various cardiac diseases there's epilepsy there's a lot of different cancers bone cancers breast cancers brain tumors.

Today the team is taking blood samples from boxers which are susceptible to a fatal heart disease called cardiomyopathy. The DNA in their blood could hold vital clues to the causes of the disease. Once we had the dog genome sequence we could design a gene chip which would allow us to compare all of our sick dogs our healthy dogs and find the genes that are causing diseases. Using the Geno typing machine Dr. Karlsson simultaneously analyzes thousands of regions of DNA from boxers with and without this disease. So what you see when you compare the sick dogs to the healthy dogs and go across the genome from someone becomes home to and across is that most of the points are right near zero and there's not a lot of differences between healthy dogs and the sick dogs and so you get a chromosome 17 in there all of a sudden you have a huge number of differences. And this is really exciting exist means that this is the region of the genome that holds a gene that's causing our disease. Now with the mutations identity known the team is able to locate the

corresponding gene in humans. It's accelerated a process that without dogs could have taken decades. I think that there's probably a lot of diseases that are so complicated in humans that dogs basically give us a huge head start on that. We can really say that dogs. Are good for our health. For a pet that has been around so long dog research is a surprisingly new area of science. Experiments have shown what dog owners have always suspected after thousands of years of living together. Dogs are attuned to us like no other animal. It's a very alive to actually know it all and especially don't look at those you like this is got to be good for yourself. It's kind of impossible to have a bad day when you coming home to a white knight and I want to tell you I think I thought imagine life without her. It's quite straight what nothing and I think before we had said.

And yet now we would fail but we were lucky if it wasn't they just didn't feel like they are the best thing ever they keep. New research has taken our understanding of how dogs evolved to a whole new level. Getting us closer. To what it means to be today. Well we can have good relationships with a wide variety of animals. Historically our relationship with dogs seems to be the longest one with any domestic animal. I think one reason that there are almost seven billion people on earth is in large part due to the role that dogs have played in our evolutionary existence. Personally I don't think it's any coincidence that the dog is referred to as man's best friend. I know. The exploration continues on his website where you can stream dogs decode it

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