While the following might have some four-legged friends wagging their tails, feline readers may be less than pleased. Dr Shane Bergin, physicist and Assistant Professor in Science Education at UCD's School of Education, joined Colm Ó Mongáin on RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne to explore how science can explain the behaviour of dogs and the ancient relationship between dogs and humans. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
What are dogs? How different are they from wolves?
Dogs are our oldest domesticated pet and we've had dogs with us as humans for tens of thousands of years, back to the time when we were hunter-gatherers, says Bergin. Wolves are a relation of dogs and the way they hunt - in the wild in packs and by effectively wearing out large prey - is also how humans used to hunt. That's where the relationship began.
"Before we learned how to farm, we used to run after things, hit it with sticks, eventually slow it down, beat it up, eat it. The only difference is that we have bigger brains, that we learned how to adapt and to move on to cook the meat and to farm.
"Effectively, we would have been competing for food at at the same time, so it made sense to join forces and to use the wolf to to help the human hunt and vice versa. Over time, they became domesticated and they became man's best friend. There are burial records that are 14,000 years old, showing humans being buried with dogs which suggests at that point they were actually pets, rather than just some sort of wild animal that hung around".
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Why are there so many varieties of domesticated dogs?
Wolves don't appear to have substantially changed since back in the day, yet there are a huge variety of domesticated dogs. How did that happen? Selective breeding, explains Bergin. "Certain breeds of dog - and they all are the same species - they have different characteristics. What would have happened slowly over time is that breeders would have looked to select out those characteristics.
"Think of what your terrier might do, digging out when hunting, or a retriever that might go and bring back something that you've killed, or indeed a collie that might have a herding instinct. They would have picked the best pup in a litter, said these are the characteristics that we want to continue, and selected that one to breed the next generation and these things sort of built up. I don't think there's another species out there that has such variety. You can go from a chihuahua to an Irish wolfhound and they're effectively the same thing."
How did dogs reel us in? Is it their facial expressions?
"We don't fully understand the goings on of our dogs and what goes on in their heads, but we've co-evolved", says Bergin. "They know that if they behave in certain ways, we'll respond: we'll give them the treat, we'll take them on the walk, we look after them, we'll give them the sort of the social company that they really want as packed animals. So they've learned to figure out how to manipulate us.
"When you think of the characteristics of dogs: the head tilts when you're talking to them, the wagging of the tail, or just the excitement to see you come home. All of these things are done because they know that when they behave like that we respond in a way that that makes them feel good."
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Why do dogs tilt their heads?
Bergin says that the head tilt is incredible, but we don't fully understand the nature of it. "It's thought that the dog may actually be using a good ear when listening to you. When you think about what a dog is experiencing when we're chatting away, they don't understand language but most dogs understand a certain number of words, most notably their name."
"If you're talking away and then all of a sudden you look at the dog and you make eye contact with it and you use a word like its name or maybe something like 'walk', they'll look at you, they now are staring at you thinking, 'there's something for me' and effectively, 'I have your full attention'.
Are some dogs better than others at learning words?
Certain dogs have been able to learn an incredible number of words. Can you guess what breed? It's the border collie. "While certain dogs are used for Guide Dogs, like labradors and retrievers, other ones like the collie are known to be the geniuses because they can remember lots of words. They can also understand individual words and they can put them in context: certain collies are able to understand 'get the sock and put it with the ball' or 'get the ball and put it with the socks'."
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Does your dog bark at the postman?
If your dog is always barking when the post gets delivered, there could be a solution: let the dog meet the postman. Bergin says he did talk to his postman about this one day. "I said, 'do you get many dogs having a go?' Not so much anymore, he said, dogs are better behaved than they used to be. But he said it does work if they get to know the dog and they form a relationship and the dog knows that they're not a threat.
"But this is common to all dog [breeds]. They all behave like this, the wild ones and the domesticated ones. They're pack animals and so they think we humans are part of their pack and when something comes to threaten their territory, they're going to make a bit of noise about it."
Unfortunately, science has yet to explain why small dogs tend to be yappier than the bigger ones.
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Is a dog good for your health?
Dogs can be used to transform people's lives. "Think about people who have guide dogs or assistance dogs, they can genuinely transform those people's lives", says Bergin. "I have the great privilege of being what's called a 'free run buddy' for a guide dog called Gaston.
"When he's not working, I take him out for a run around UCD and he behaves like a dog and that helps him to go do his job with his owner Patricia. When he's with me he behaves as any other labrador would, it's his downtime and it helps him to work better. Like us, a guide dog also needs some play time and the chance to run around freely."
But dogs can impact your health more generally too. "There was a study done in Sweden that showed that if you're a dog owner the risk of cardiovascular disease is significantly lower. Indeed it's lower for certain sorts of dogs as well."
Is that because of the exercise or the mood aspect? We don't know. "Like with a lot of science studies it's correlation rather than causation," he says. "So we don't know if there's a particular reason having the dog helps you to be less likely to die from heart disease. But we could imagine that if you're a dog owner, you're more inclined - on a day when it's raining or when you might otherwise sit back and watch telly - to say, I better bring the dog for a walk. So you're more likely to be active. You're also more likely to feel less lonely, because you have another creature there with you in the house. So the social effects of having a dog are enormous."
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"There's studies that show that having dogs around the house can improve the immune systems of the people that live in the house. Having a dog affects your gut biome. They bring in a certain amount of 'stuff' into the home, you take on some of it and they yours, and effectively you're a little healthier, your immune system is a little stronger and you can defend things."
"Dogs feet, it should be known, are far cleaner than the shoes of humans. So even though we think the dog is dragging in muck the whole time, it's been shown in study after study that dogs are actually incredibly effective at being able to clean themselves."
Why do dogs eat our shoes?
"I can only imagine what our shoes smell like to dogs, but they have a nice texture to chew on. They do that because dogs really experience the world through hearing and taste so they'll go for things that have a very strong human odour, like our shoes.
"They'll do this to an excess sometimes when they have separation anxiety, in other words when their owner has left and gone out for a few hours. The dog will go and find something that smells of them and chew on it a little bit nervously until the human comes back."
