By Emily Anthes
Most students at the Biological Sciences Building at Duke University are trying to master the finer points of cellular biology, genetics or evolution.
In one classroom, however, students learn altogether different lessons, such as how to sit politely and walk calmly on a leash. These furry pupils are enrolled in Duke Puppy Kindergarten, a research project examining how dogs become who they are.
Each semester, a new class of puppies arrives from Canine Companions, a nonprofit organization that trains service dogs. Over the course of 12 weeks, the dogs play games designed to assess their temperaments and cognitive abilities. The goal is to learn how to raise and identify dogs that can perform tasks like assisting children with disabilities or veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The project is led in part by Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist and cognitive scientist who directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center.
Hare and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist at the center, describe the study in their new book, “Puppy Kindergarten.” They spoke to The New York Times in a video call while a 10-month-old Labrador retriever named Neutron lounged at their feet. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: You’ve been studying dogs for a long time. What prompted you to focus on puppies in particular?
BRIAN HARE: There’s this big problem in the world of working dogs, because the current approach is that you raise lots and lots of dogs, and you don’t really find out if they’re going to be able to do these jobs until they’re 2 years old. What if we could predict, before dogs start their training, which dog is most likely to make it?
Q: And you raised these dogs in two different ways?
VANESSA WOODS: We had 101 puppies. Half of them were raised normally: They went home with a family and came in every two weeks for testing. The second group was raised in this “supersocialization” condition. We know that if you deprive puppies of socialization, it has all sorts of negative impacts. What if you supersocialize them? That’s when we started the puppy kindergarten.
Each puppy in puppy kindergarten has three to four “parents” — students that they go home with. They rotate through the dorm. Then they get dropped off in the morning, just like kindergarten, and we have a rotation of about 100 volunteers. They went out into the Duke community with the puppies. They went to the library. They visited the pediatric nurses at the hospital. They went to the dining hall. And then we compared the two groups.
HARE: For our cognitive measures, it had absolutely no impact, the two different ways we raised them. I wouldn’t have predicted that.
Q: How do you explain that?
HARE: There’s a threshold. Our finding is not “It doesn’t matter how you raise your dog.” But when you get above a threshold of responsible socialization — which is “I’m going to take my dog out on walks, and they’ll meet new people and new dogs” — exaggerating that doesn’t really have any measurable added benefits.
WOODS: It’s good news. You’re enough to raise your puppy. You don’t need 100 undergraduates.
Q: Running a puppy kindergarten sounds like kind of a dream job. Was it?
WOODS: All the puppies come, and it’s so great. Toward the end of the semester, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so tired.” Nobody raises puppies this way for a reason. Their self-control doesn’t hit until they’re about 10 to 12 weeks old. Then they start teething, and then they’re going to have this uptick in puppy energy. And it’s crazy.
HARE: You’d raise them; they’re finally sleeping; they can go to the bathroom outside. And then they graduate, and we do it all over again. It was a dream job, but it’s an exhausting dream.
WOODS: The whole point of the project was to see the impact that we would have on the dogs. What we didn’t expect is what it was going to do for the campus community. People loved these puppies. We have survey data from before and after. Puppies are just the key to happiness.
HARE: Ten percent of the student body volunteered. It ended up bringing together people from all over campus, people who never would have met but had this shared interest in dogs.
Q: You found that different cognitive abilities develop at different times. Can you give me some examples?
HARE: What comes online when puppies are 8 to 9 weeks old are things like following human gestures, basic memory and perceptual abilities. Around 10 to 12 weeks, puppies start having their first success with a simple self-control task. They also start making a lot of eye contact with people.
Then, at 13 or 14 weeks, two things happen that are more complicated. They pass a really hard self-control task. And they start to pass a causal reasoning task, where they have to understand that solid objects don’t pass through each other.
Then there’s the question of when do they reach what would be an adult-level performance. Their ability to follow gestures, for instance, reaches adult performance within a week. It’s amazing. Self-control takes many, many weeks.
Q: It’s not just that different skills emerge at different times, but also that individual dogs have different strengths and weaknesses.
HARE: Absolutely. There were dogs who were remarkably good —
WOODS: Genius puppies.
HARE: — who were just really good at everything. And there were some puppies who weren’t that good at anything. Maybe this guy right here (gesturing toward Neutron).
WOODS: Olfaction!
HARE. It was the only one. Neutron got a perfect score on olfaction. But for most of the dogs, the scores were all over the place. Part of our job now is to follow these dogs as they grow up and see which of those cognitive profiles is most predictive of success.
Q: What are the takeaways for pet owners?
WOODS: One of the things that I learned was just that playing games with puppies is super interesting. Even with our old dog, Tassie — we ran him through the experiments because we needed a pilot subject. Tassie had a terrible memory.
HARE: But he was very empathic. And I think that’s one of the really important things: Love your dog for who they are. They’re all going to be different. But who they are is a wonderful thing.
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