Your Dog Questions Answered! | Compilation

[Music] plenty of people think of dogs as their best friends and the fact that we live with them so closely means that we get to know them pretty well but sometimes our furry friends can act in ways that are surprising beguiling or downright mysterious and over the years we here at scishow have answered a lot of questions about them like a lot it turns out we all have a lot of questions about dogs one of the first ones that springs to mind is are they really color blind or is that just a misconception turns out dogs can see color just not in the way that we do here's Michael with more maybe you've heard that dogs can only see in black and white it's one of those fun factoids that people like to toss around sometimes but this like so many things we talked about on quick questions is a misconception and the misconception stems from the fact that dogs are from a human perspective colorblind but that doesn't mean they can't see color we perceive color through a series of receptors in the retinas of our eyes called cones and humans have three kinds each of which is activated by a specific wavelength of light corresponding to a certain set of colors most humans have cones that can detect blue green and red wavelengths of light but dogs kind of like humans who are colorblind only have two kinds of cones that work for dogs the two colors they can register are blue and yellow so dogs can't see the color red but they can see and distinguish between various shades of yellow blue gray and something that probably comes through as a dirty greenish Brown so while we see this your dog sees something more like this it's not exactly Technicolor but it's a lot more information than just black and white and setting the record straight about dogs partial color vision is teaching us a lot about how pups experience the world recent experiments have found that dogs who are trained to find dark yellow objects could still find them even if they were replaced with very light yellow ones and they didn't mistake dark blue objects for the dark yellow ones either suggesting that dogs can clearly distinguish between many different shades and colors and don't just see in greyscale so the next time you ask your dog to fetch your blue slippers and he comes back with a pair of bananas he's not colorblind he's just messing with you if your dog is smart enough to pull a prank like that you might want to recommend them for doggy Mensa or you might want to enlist them to test that old adage that old dogs can't learn new tricks it's possible we believe that because older dogs don't learn as readily as puppies but research shows that teaching them new tricks could be a really nice thing to do for your senior pups here's what the science says they say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks but that saying might not be as trustworthy as you'd think past puppyhood dogs aren't actually set in their ways in fact research shows that not only can old dogs learn new tricks but teaching them could be a really good way of improving their quality of life a few studies have investigated this specifically for example a group of European researchers trained two hundred and sixty-five dogs across multiple studies as recently as 2017 to push their noses against a touchscreen it showed them pictures like flowers cups and other things and when the canines picked the right picture they were given a treat it took the animals a while to really get the hang of the game but eventually even the oldest doggie participants cut on and they could consistently pick the correct picture to get a treat while all dogs could learn to pick the right image the researchers did notice that dogs over the age of 13 were much slower at learning than the younger ones and that's because dogs like humans take longer to learn things as they get older dogs cognitive development parallels ours in some ways just like kids seem to be faster at picking up new languages than adults puppies seem to be generally quicker on the uptake than older dogs a 2014 study that tested a hundred and forty five Border Collies on skills like memory and attention found the dogs faculties start to decline as they get older maybe in a similar way that happens in humans they also found that older dogs were just generally less interested in new stimuli while puppies are curious about anything and everything older dogs tend to lose interest in things more quickly or tune them out entirely so in order for older dogs to learn new things you have to try a bit harder to capture their attention but even though it takes them a bit longer to learn new tricks that doesn't mean it's any less important the researchers think that just like older humans can derive satisfaction from brain puzzles like crosswords a bit of mental stimulation might be great for keeping older dogs healthy and happy a twelve year old dog might not have as much energy to play fetch as she did when she was a puppy but she can still benefit from playing games and computer games like the ones used in these studies require less energy so they might just fit the bill the researchers even suggested their experimental setup could potentially be adapted to let dogs play computer games at home so not only can old dogs learn new tricks research suggests it's a great idea to try and teach them it may a little tougher for them but it seems to be worth the effort but what if your dog is tuckered out from a long day of educational computer games and just wants to chill for a bit you know kick back and watch some YouTube you might have noticed your canine companion reacting to things they see on a computer or TV screen suggesting that they can watch TV at least sort of it turns out they don't see exactly what we do when they're looking at a screen because TV screens are designed for humans but Doc's actually process visual information a little differently here's Hank with the details by the way this clip has some brief flashing lights so if you're sensitive to those just skip ahead until you see me again does your dog ever seem more excited for the next season of Game of Thrones than you are or like weirdly into barking at nature documentaries if so like a lot of our patreon supporters you might have wondered whether your dog is really watching TV or if you're just reading a little too much into things well science is here to tell you that they are probably watching it but they aren't seeing exactly the same thing you are some dogs just seem to love watching TV watching habits can vary by breed some like hounds are mostly motivated by smells so they are less likely to be interested in the scent free images on a screen herding dogs on the other hand tend to get excited when they see movement so they may be more readily drawn to video but regardless of breed what dogs see on the screen is definitely not what we see dogs visual systems are much more sensitive to flickering which helps them perceive movement more efficiently so if you were to start flashing a light on and off slowly and then ramp up the speed you'd stop being able to distinguish the flashes when it's flickering faster than 55 times per second a beagle on the other hand can see pulses that flash up to around 80 times a second the image on an old standard TV screen refreshes about 60 times a second fast enough that we can't see the individual pictures but too slow to fool our furry best friends so - your pup your favorite show might look less like a video and more like dancing in a very fast strobe light or thumbing through a flipbook and that's not the only part that might underwhelm them no matter what type of TV you have what might look like a vibrant colorful image - you could be pretty meh for your dog that's because a typical scene uses a lot of hues that they can't distinguish instead of having three different color receptors in their eyes like us dogs only have two so they only see worlds and shades of yellow and blue but if you really want Fido or spot to be able to enjoy TV with you science has some tips there's nothing you can do about the colors but you can get a new TV if you've been holding out on a lot of modern TVs the image on the screen changes more than 60 times per second you can also choose shows that your furry best friends will find more engaging dogs can be drawn into watching videos by noises they already find intriguing like barking or toys squeaking and unsurprisingly they seem to like watching other dogs which is why we're gonna have a new show hosted only by dogs for dogs just dogs that's it you'll probably want to go for live action not cartoons like lassie not Clifford dogs are intelligent enough to recognize photos and videos of dogs and other animals which might be why they don't respond so well to animation probably don't look enough like the real thing but maybe we have anecdotal reports from inside the studio that it does work on at least one dog if you really want to go all out there are even satellite TV channels with programming designed for dogs the brightness colors sounds and camera angles are specifically chosen to appeal just to them what but if your dog is not interested in TV don't sweat its researchers haven't actually looked to see how screen time affects dogs so we don't know if it has any consequences long-term and you might think your dog is already enough of a couch potato in any case they'll probably be just as happy may be happier if you go on a walk and that's good for you too we've all probably heard that if we love our dogs we shouldn't give them chocolate even if they see us enjoying it and seemed to promise that they would love it too please just a little taste once again this comes down to a key difference between humans and dogs this time in how our digestive systems process the foods we've adapted to eat here are the details if you have a dog you've probably heard that chocolate will make your pet sick and that also applies to other pets like cats rats and mice but that just doesn't seem fair why do we get to go to town on a giant bar of dark chocolate but Fido shouldn't even have one bite it all has to do with a molecule called theobromine which is made up of carbon hydrogen nitrogen and oxygen atoms and along with its partner caffeine is one of the many reasons humans have loved chocolate for thousands of years both molecules are dangerous for dogs but chocolate contains a lot more theobromine than it does caffeine so it's the molecule to watch out for like caffeine theobromine is a type of alkaloid which is a huge class of molecules that generally contain rings with at least one nitrogen atom in them and alkaloids often have physiological effects on humans and other animals also like caffeine theobromine makes our hearts pump faster our blood vessels dilate and some of our muscles get more energy which sounds great but too much of it can make our hearts pump too quickly and our muscles contract uncontrollably eventually leading to nausea convulsions heart attack and even death luckily for our taste buds we humans process theobromine pretty quickly so that's not something you have to worry about it rarely sticks around long enough to cause any harm but our pets aren't so lucky they process theobromine a lot more slowly so we can easily build up and cause those dangerous effects it's hard to know exactly why we evolved to be better at digesting theobromine but it might be because alkaloids mostly come from plants and our ancestors ate a lot more plants than early cats or dogs did whatever the reason the same amount of theobromine stays in pets bodies much longer giving it more time to pile up and cause harm on top of that most pets are a lot lighter than humans so it really doesn't take much chocolate to make them sick cats don't often get poisoned from chocolate because they can't taste sweet things so they're generally not too interested in it but dogs sure are your average adult human would need to eat about eight kilograms of dark chocolate to get a lethal dose of theobromine but a medium-sized dog would only need to eat about one kilogram and a house cat would only need a tenth of a kilogram sweeter chocolates have less the Oboro mean so the lethal dose is higher about five kilograms of milk chocolate for dogs and about a third of a kilogram for cats but they'd be sick long before eating that much meanwhile you and I would have to eat about half of our body weight in milk chocolate for a lethal dose which might sound wonderful but I don't want to see any of you writing challenge accepted in the comments because you'd be very sick way before finishing that much chocolate among other things I'm trying very hard not to picture what that would do to your digestive system but the next time you decide to indulge in a chocolate bar or three just keep it to yourself no matter how long your dog gives you those adorable puppy eyes but how in tune with our emotions are they really do they know we're sorry we can't give them chocolate or what about the old bit of folk knowledge that dogs can smell fear there's actually a bit of research to back that one up it's possible the dogs really can sense certain emotional states thanks to the chemistry of our sweat and their incredible sense of smell at least maybe here's Hank to tell us about it if it hasn't been said to you you've probably heard it on TV or in a movie stay calm around strange dogs because they can smell fear and they might attack but until recently scientists hadn't looked to see if that was true now we know that they can smell fear but when they do they don't get aggressive they actually get scared - dogs have amazing noses their sense of smell is ten to 100 thousand times better than ours which is why they can help us detect traces of chemicals from bombs drugs and even people buried under the snow that's thanks to the sheer number of olfactory receptors they have up to three hundred million compared to our measly six million and to the fact that relative to their size the part of their brain that analyzes smells is about 40 times the size of ours but even so dogs don't rely entirely on their sniffers when they want to communicate with each other or with us that usually can use body language and vocalizations as well when we tell them they're such a good dog oh they process the tone of our voice and the words that we're speaking in different brain areas just like we do when other humans talk which means they do understand what we're saying to some extent and we know that dogs are good at picking up on physical signals in fact studies have shown that they can differentiate between our emotions based off of our faces and body language so for a while most scientists and dog trainers figured that dogs don't need to sniff out our feelings they can see it in our posture and hear it in our voice it wasn't until recently that researchers looked directly into whether dogs can smell fear when we're afraid the sweat we produce contains different chemicals than when we're happy or sad because the composition of our blood changes in response to hormonal signals so scientists can stick swabs in our armpits while inducing different emotions and then to see how dogs react to those odors and they did this in a 2016 study published in behavioral brain research and then found that dog's heart rates increased when they sniff sweat from people who watch a scary video suggesting that they can smell fear but the animals had the same reaction to sweat from people who worked out so it wasn't clear if they were just sensing physical arousal then a study an animal cognition and 20:17 did a similar experiment they had dogs sniff pads with sweat from people who watch scary or happy videos or unused pads but this time the researchers watched the dog's behavior afterwards and looked at heart rates the dogs that smelled the happy sweat were friendlier to strangers their heart rates were generally higher than the controls but lower than the dogs that had sniffed the fearful sweat meanwhile the dogs that smelled fear seemed stressed out seeking more reassurance from their owners and acting more wary of new people and like the previous study their heart rates went out so the researchers concluded that the dogs were detecting emotions and reacting by feeling a similar way sniffing joy put them in a better mood and the smell of fear it didn't make them more aggressive it scared them so it seems like dogs can potentially smell fear and know how you're feeling but rest assured the feeling will probably be mutual but smell isn't the primary way dogs communicate with us tails wag ears perk up and if you're lucky you'll get one of those doggy smiles and we have our own ways of communicating with them too we make very specific changes in our voices when we speak to dogs as you know if you've ever veered into the who's a good boy territory the really interesting thing is that this isn't just about us putting on a silly voice when we see a cute puppy it actually seems to affect how dogs interact with us here's Michael to tell us about the research it's hard to resist you see an adorable puppy in the park or outside a cafe and all of a sudden your voice jumps up about two octaves and you're talking total gooey nonsense who's a good boy but there's actually a good reason for this puppy talk and it has a lot to do with the bond between person and pooch so-called dog directed speech is actually very similar to the way we talked to babies which is called infant directed speech it's higher pitched slower and kind of sing-songy compared to our usual conversational tones because both dogs and infants are non-verbal researchers believe we exaggerate other parts of speech like melody or pitch to keep their attention and it seems to work at least in younger dogs in an experiment in 2017 a loud speaker played pre-recorded puppy talk for ten dogs and ten puppies the puppies approached the speaker more quickly and sat by it for longer when the speaker played you'd see puppy talk than they did for regular adult speech but it may not just be the tone dogs may pay attention to the content of our speech as well which sure dogs can't talk but dog owners know better than to casually use words like treat or walk unless you're ready for the consequences in the form of puppy excitement in a 2018 study researchers tested dogs responses to our content versus our tone by creating a Miss mash of dog directed and human directed speech when they played typical doggie talk in a dog directed voice come on let's go for a walk the dogs preferred it to typical adult directed speech experimenters also read human scripts about boring human stuff like going to the gym but it was spoken in a cute doggy voice they also recorded the opposite cutesy who's a good boy phrases in a normal adult voice when they played the recordings to adult dogs the dogs had no preference for doggy talk when the cutesy style of speaking was used to talk about boring non dog topics apparently the doggy words mattered too when it came to getting their attention and dog directed speech might have another function to improving the bond between human and animal dogs and wolves yowl in a high pitch when greeting each other and when asking for food or care from their mother and some scientists hypothesized that we humans might have unintentionally hijacked this form of communication during our domestication of dogs many thousands of years ago we might have selected for ones who were more tuned in and reacted positively to this way of talking by wagging their tail or yapping back for example alternatively we might just train our puppies from birth to respond to our cute puppy talk you away in that 2017 study the author suggested that the adult dogs may already be bonded to their owners and not care what the experimenters were saying and that's why they didn't care about dog directed speech like puppies did and the research overall suggests that we humans don't just talk to our dogs this way to be all gushy the dogs actually respond to it and it strengthens our bond so don't feel weird about veering into this goofy dog directed speech every time you see a Corgi you're just furthering thousands of years of companionship thanks for watching this scishow compilation which was brought to you with the help of our patrons on patreon thanks as always for your support and your great questions if you're interested in joining our community of patrons check out patreon.com/scishow [Music] you [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 445,108

Rating: 4.8720865 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, dog, pet, animal, sight, vision, olivia gordon, michael aranda, television, senses, smell, chocolate, poison, health, brain, development, puppy, fear, emotion, compilation, long, animation, communication, theobromine, alkaloid, color

Id: tc-iuVcSckc

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019