Do Dogs Dream?: Nearly Everything Your Dog Wants You to Know

The crucial aspect of an animal’s experience that causes these positive changes in its brain is exposure to a wide variety of interesting places and things.

a dog who has grabbed your knee and is merrily thrusting away is not saying “I love you,” nor is it simply trying to be “amorous.” When dogs mount human beings, they are virtually always attempting to express their feelings that they’re dominant. In effect, they want to be leader of the pack. This kind of “talk” from a dog is not permissible. It sh

The tail’s position, specifically the height that it is held, can be viewed as a sort of emotional meter.

Dogs are different, since they are primarily carnivores and in the wild most of their food is meat. Because of the high sodium content in meat,

The sweet taste buds in dogs respond to a chemical called furaneol.

From about 3,000 to around 12,000 Hz, dogs can hear sounds that average between –5 and –15 dB, meaning that they are considerably more sensitive to these higher-frequency sounds than people are. Above 12,000 Hz, human hearing ability is so bad relative to that of dogs that it doesn’t make sense to compare them numerically.

In effect, one of the distinctions between wild canines and domestic dogs is that our domestic dogs bark, while wild dogs seldom do.

A dog that is alone will not wag its tail at any lifeless thing. If you put a bowl of its food down, the dog will wag its tail to express its gratitude to you.

Using only family pets that were not specifically trained to understand language and gestures, I came to the conclusion that, on average, dogs had the mental ability roughly equivalent to that of a human two-year-old. Further work led me to believe that the most intelligent dogs might have mental abilities similar to those of a two-and-a-half-year-