Dogs Decoded

New thing of the day, watched Dogs Decoded.

The documentary is by Nova - don't you just love Nova? Anyway this is a great documentary. Was recommended by a coworker so decided to try it out. It was really really cool, very interesting and brought about some new insights on dogs.

Plus - there was one really really cute scene with puppies.

Anyway basically the documentary goes over how dogs and humans can read each other through language, barks and expressions, and scientifically proves what owners have always felt. That dogs are in-tune with a human's emotions and can read us. They also had humans listen to various dog barks with the surprising result that dog owners can tell between "playful" and "threatening" and "sad" barks of different dogs.

Apparently it seems we have grown-up with dogs and found a way to communicate with them. There's a scene where a woman can point with her finger or eyes, and dogs and even puppies (the adorable scene) will pay attention to the human and go towards their pointing. Whereas chimps and intelligent primates don't pay any attention and don't follow human social cues.

One neat feature was they bred for tameness and aggressiveness in foxes - and found that after a few generations, the genetically tame foxes became like modern domesticated dogs, trainable, sociable and livable with humans.

Another neat scene is where they show how wild wolves were raised in homes with humans, to see if nurturing would tame them. Unfortunately the "wild" came out in the wolf after a certain point and no amount of training would work.

So it was interesting to see that some dogs/animals are just genetically too wild, and the modern dog is different through generations of tameness and sociability with humans.

They even think that dogs were essential to the beginnings of civilization with herding and survival. They believe the cooperation between dogs and humans has lasted much longer than previously believed.

Lots of great stuff in here. If you haven't seen it - I recommend! It's worth even just listening to if you're doing chores, but you may be hooked to watch some of it.

Fantastic! Catch it on Netflix streaming :)