Not all dogs are created equal. According to an article in the new issue of Miller-McCune magazine, evidence shows that some dogs are smarter than others. But even the average dog is as smart as a 2-year-old kid, with the ability to comprehend more than 150 words, count to five and consciously deceive their loving owners.  

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by Carla Baranauckas

When Chad, a yellow Labrador retriever, moved in with Claire Vaccaro’s family in Manhattan last spring, he already had an important role. As an autism service dog, he was joining the family to help protect Ms. Vaccaro’s 11-year-old son, Milo. Like many companion animals, whether service dogs or pets, Chad had an immediate effect — the kind of effect that is noticeable but has yet to be fully understood through scientific study. And it went beyond the tether that connects dog and boy in public.

“Within, I would say, a week, I noticed enormous changes,” Ms. Vaccaro said of Milo, whose autism impairs his ability to communicate and form social bonds. “More and more changes have happened over the months as their bond has grown. He’s much calmer. He can concentrate for much longer periods of time. It’s almost like a cloud has lifted.”

Dr. Melissa A. Nishawala, clinical director of the autism-spectrum service at the Child Study Center at New York University, said she saw “a prominent and noticeable change” in Milo, even though the dog just sat quietly in the room. “He started to give me narratives in a way he never did,” she said, adding that most of them were about the dog.

The changes have been so profound that Ms. Vaccaro and Dr. Nishawala are starting to talk about weaning Milo from some of his medication.

Anecdotes abound on the benefits of companion animals — whether service and therapy animals or family pets — on human health. But in-depth studies have been rare. Now the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health, is embarking on an effort to study whether these animals can have a tangible effect on children’s well-being.

In partnership with the Waltham Center for Pet Nutrition in England (part of the Mars candy and pet food company), the child health institute is seeking proposals that “focus on the interaction between humans and animals.” In particular, it is looking for studies on how these interactions affect typical development and health, and whether they have therapeutic and public-health benefits. It also invites applications for studies that “address why relationships with pets are more important to some children than to others” and that “explore the quality of child-pet relationships, noting variability of human-animal relationships within a family.”

The national institutes’ interest in this type of research goes back at least two decades. Valerie Maholmes, who directs research on child development and behavior at the children’s health institute, said that at a broad-ranging meeting in 1987 on the health benefits of pets, the N.I.H. “concluded that there needed to be much more research,” especially on child development.

People working with animals expect the research to back up their observations. At Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Southern California, for instance, dozens of volunteers regularly take their dogs to visit patients. Children being treated for serious illnesses often have the blues, anxiety or depression. Animals also become part of the therapeutic program, especially in the areas involving speech and movement.

“The human-animal bond bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the heart and emotions and nurtures us in ways that nothing else can,” said Karin Winegar, whose book “Saved: Rescued Animals and the Lives They Transform” (Da Capo, 2008) chronicles human-animal interactions. “We’ve seen this from coast to coast, whether it’s disabled children at a riding center in California or a nursing home in Minnesota, where a woman with Alzheimer’s could not recognize her husband but she could recognize their beloved dog.”

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Ever wondered how smart your dog is? New research says he/she could be as intelligent as a 2-year-old child.

This news comes from canine researcher Stanley Coren who insists that dogs are more like humans than we think.

Dogs are very intelligent, and have the ability to learn commands over time if trained by somebody who knows what they are doing. Dogs play a huge role in society, both as pets and therapy dogs, to bomb detecting and rescue work.

Speaking at the American Psychological Association’s convention in Toronto, Coren stated that our beloved 4-legged friends may even have the ability to perform basic math.

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by Nicholas Wade (The New York Times)

Few people spend their honeymoon catching and drawing blood from village dogs up and down Africa. But Ryan and Corin Boyko, two anthropologists at the University of California, Davis, chose this way to collect valuable genetic data that is casting a new light on the domestication of dogs.

The two researchers wondered if the dogs carried a recently discovered gene that downsizes dogs from wolves and is found in all small dog breeds. Dr. Bustamante said the idea could be explored by collecting street dogs. Ryan and Corin Boyko collected 223 samples of village dog blood from Egypt, Uganda and Namibia. The small gene question has not yet been assessed, but their samples, reported in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have called into question a finding on the origin of dog domestication from wolves.

The origin is thought to be East Asia, based on a 2002 survey of both village dogs and breed dogs. But most of the village dogs in that survey came from East Asia, which could have tilted the outcome. The African village dogs turn out to have much the same amount of genetic diversity as those of East Asia. This is puzzling because the origin of a species is usually also the source of greatest genetic diversity.

The Boykos and Dr. Bustamante do not think dogs were domesticated in Africa — there are no wolves in Africa now, apart from the Ethiopian wolf — but they say the origin may not be East Asia. The issue is better addressed by looking just at village dogs, they think, and by excluding European breeds, which are mostly of recent origin.

They are now collecting samples from village dogs throughout the world in hope of tracing not just the place or places where dogs were first domesticated, but also the travels that dogs then took around the world with their masters. The lack of any sharp gradient of genetic diversity between East Asian and African village dogs could mean that once domesticated, dogs spread very quickly from their point of origin. Another explanation, Dr. Boyko said, is that they originated at some point halfway between the two regions, like in the Caucasus mountains.

The solution to the origin of the dog will come from sampling wolves throughout the world as well as village dogs, Dr. Wayne said. A genome-scanning chip, similar to those developed for studying the human genome, has been developed for dogs.


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A Brazilian company "PetSmiling" launched The Doggie Lover Doll, available for purchase now to placate your randy canine.
That’s right, a doll for dogs to practice safe sex. The majority of non-neutered dogs spend a good chunk of time looking for something to hump. They try pillows, furry creatures, people’s legs and even other animals.

To put an end to this nonsense and improve the little ones' lives, PetSmiling, headquartered in Miami and in São Paulo is bringing to the market the Doggie Lover Doll. Equipped with an easy-to-clean reservoir and a tube of water-based intimate lubricant, this doll comes in three sizes: small, medium and large, to satisfy all existing breeds.

“I had the idea to make this doll when my Maltese started to grab everybody’s legs. I did some research and couldn’t find anything like it, anywhere in the world. I decided to make it!”, reveals Marco Giroto, the owner of PetSmiling.

According to the company: "during the doll’s test period with a few canines, including the Maltese Flock (responsible for the idea), the pets showed a better quality of life based on less anxiety, less barking, and less territorial demarcation. In other words, the dogs live a better life, satisfying their repressed sexuality, in some cases for many years."

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