Wonder What Your Pup is Thinking

8/9/2019 Wonder What Your Pup is Thinking

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com | Maurijones J. de Albuquerque

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Wonder What Your Pup IsThinking?

Newsweek: Pets are increasingly seen as part of the family, somore owners are looking to pet psychics & therapists for insightinto their lives.

Your dog may be taking advantage of you

Study: All dogs imitate their owners


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Whats Your PoochThinking?Pet ownership is at an all-time high, and spending on animals hasbeen increasing steadily despite a recession. Pet psychics may just bethe new normal.

Pet Psychic: Paul the Octopus is Unhappy

NEWSWEEK visited an animal medium to find out what celebrity animals are thinking and feeling,including Bo Obama and Paul, the octopus now famous for predicting World Cup matches. Downloadthe video as a podcast for your portable device: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/newsweek-video/id88000805

As Spaniards respectfully pass on the calamari in honor of Paul the Octopus, who

predicted the countrys World Cup win, people all over the world are becoming morecurious and determined to figure out exactly what it is animals are thinking.


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Horses are the most gossipy, says Lisa Greene, a pet psychic from Houston. Theyll

always tell me everything thats going on in the barn. Snakes usually have a pretty

bizarre sense of humor. And rodents like to spell for me. Recently on the schedule: a

reading for a whale.

With pet ownership at an all-time high, and spending on animals increasing steadily

despite a recession, the progression from providing our family pets a comfortable

goose-down feather bed to wanting to know what is going on in their little heads seems

natural.

Although the American Pet Products Association keeps no data about animal psychics

specifically, it attributes spending on pets well-being during a recession to an increasing

humanization of animals. I think its that more people are owning pets, and more

people are treating their pets like a part of the family, says Alison Anderson, an APPA

spokesperson. Products keep getting stranger.

Gallery of extreme gadgets for your pets.


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Modern Pet-cessories Americans spent a total of $45.5 billion in 2009 on their animals.

That was up 5.4 percent from 2008. Such booming services as massage therapy,

antidepressant treatment, and grief counseling account for the increase. An annual


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study by the APPA noted that pet services continues to be a growing category as they

become more closely modeled after those offered to people. So it stands to reason,

perhaps, that pet communicators who can help us know what our little friends are

thinking are a relatively easy find these days.

Greene, who has worked as a pet psychic for just over 10 years, may, in a busy week,

receive anywhere from 15 to 40 calls. Not all the animals want to talk to me, she says.

I have some animals flip me the paw. She considers her services a luxury item, with

rates of $120 for an hourlong telephone consultation during which she speaks with the

owner, who asks her questions to communicate psychically to the animal, and $240 for

in-home/in-barn treatment.

And while clients have more typically been women, Greene has noticed a change.

Recently cowboys have begun to call her to ask about their horses. These are good ol

boys from Texas, she says. You wouldnt think they would call a pet psychic. It

changes the way they compete and train.

The majority of people call because they have a problem, she says. Theyre not

getting along, or [their animals] have a health issue. A lot of times people call because

their animals are dying.

A lot of its curiosity, says Susan Hoffman Peacock, a dressage instructor and ranch

owner in Corona, Calif. Its justification for what youre doing with the animals on a daily

basis, and to see if theres any way you can get more information. For nearly two

decades she has had animal communicator Lydia Hilby visit her barn to tell her what the

horses are thinking. I think most people go with the idea [that] if anything comes out of

it, [it] may be useful.


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Gallery of the history of Greek protest dogs.

She remembers Hilby interacting with one horse that had a pinched nerve in its neck, a

condition about which, she says, the psychic had no way of knowing. She said, He

said he doesnt need surgery, and he can, most of the time, feel his right front foot, and

hes fine. Peacock tells favorite stories about one horse admitting he preferred a

purple saddle blanket with gold trim, and another confessing that he had stolen a

lollipop from a child.


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I dont think most people expect a psychic to change everything you do with your

horse, she says. Youre hoping to get some little piece of information that might help

out.

Rebecca Johnson, director of the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction at the

University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine, works to facilitate healthy

relationships between humans and animals. She understands communication across

species in somewhat different terms. She speaks of reading signals effectively, and

remaining alert to subtle cues: tension in an animals body, a lowering of its head, its

ears going back.

Animals are communicating through pheromones, Johnson says. Veterinarians canuse their sense of smellwe use our eyes and ears, our sense of touch. Animals are

communicating a lot of the time, but we simply cant speak their language. She agrees

that we have much to learn about our pets, but through attentiveness to behavior rather

than efforts to translate their thoughts. And she finds the humanization of pets extremely

common and increasingly problematic.

Part of the reason pets are attractive to us is people think of them like babies, she

says. They have round, big eyes, and they have a limited capacity for intellecttheyre

more like children. But I think that we do a disservice to animals when we try to make

them more like us.

Shira Plotzker, a pet psychic in Nyack, N.Y., does not need to see, hear, smell, or feel

an animal to do her workshe can use a photograph, or even a phone call. She says

she hears animals as clearly as people, often in excitable, little voices. One young horse

allegedly said to Plotzker: Tell mommy I want to learn do a curtsey! I see all the other

horses doing it because they do dressage! Said a dog: I want to go to Grandmas!

Grandma feeds me eggs!

Owners marvel at such specifics. It gives people a bond, says Plotzker, or a deeper

love.

Often clients approach her after their pet has died. One grieving woman said recently

that she didnt want to talk about the dog, she wanted to talk with the dog.


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Dogs sneak food when

we're not looking'Duh!' dog owners may say, but new finding should not be takenlightly

By Jennifer Viegas

updated 7/27/2010 3:09:07 PM ET

If a dog's eyes appear to be riveted to you and your sandwich the next time you try toenjoy lunch, consider the clever, strategical intent of your rapt viewer. That's becausenew research has just demonstrated dogs quietly sneak food when we're not looking,waiting for the perfect opportunity to bite, steal and nosh.

Before every dog owner and lover reading this comments, "Duh! I knew that already,"the finding is not to be taken lightly. The research, published in the latest issue of

Applied Animal Behaviour Science, adds to the growing body of evidence that dogspossess theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others.

In other words, dogs can likely perceive what we see and know, allowing them to takeadvantage of us when opportunity arises. "Stains," a dog featured on Animal Planet,has mastered the approach, as this video shows.

Shannon Kundey of Maryland's Hood College and colleagues tested the phenomenonout in a more structured, scientific way on 20 dogs. To do this, they gave the dogs theopportunity to take food from one of two containers.

"These containers were located within the proximity of a human gatekeeper who waseither looking straight ahead or not looking at the time of choice," explained thescientists. "One container was silent when food was inserted or removed while the otherwas noisy."

The vast majority of the dogs approached the silent container that was being pseudo

ignored by the person.


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The researchers then adjusted the experiment to see how dogs would react if the foodcontainer was noisy yet was still ignored by the nearby "gatekeeper," or if the dogsweren't particularly quiet when grabbing the snack.

This owner doesn't mind sharing with a dog named "Charley."

According to the scientists, the "dogs preferentially attempted to retrieve food silentlyonly when silence was germane to obtaining food unobserved by the humangatekeeper. Interestingly, dogs sourced from a local animal shelter evidenced similaroutcomes."

This latter finding "conflicts with other recent data suggesting that shelter dogs performmore poorly than pet dogs in tasks involving human social cues," writes Kundey and her

team.


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Dogs automatically imitate

peopleSome dogs may look like their owners, but all dogs imitate theirhuman companions

By Jennifer Viegas

updated 7/28/2010 9:35:53 AM ET

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, dogs often shower us with praise. New

research has just determined dogs automatically imitate us, even when it is not in their

best interest to do so.

The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides the first

evidence that dogs copy at least some of our body movements and behaviors in ways

that are spontaneous and voluntary.

The scientists suggest owners would do well to match their own body movements, whenever possible, to tasks athand during training sessions.


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In other words, they can't really help themselves when it comes to copying people.

"This suggests that, like humans, dogs are subject to 'automatic imitation'; they cannot

inhibit online, the tendency to imitate head use and/or paw use," lead author Friederike

Range and her colleagues conclude.

It's long been known that humans do this, even when the tendency to copy interferes

with efficiency.

"For example," according to the researchers, "if people are instructed to open their

mouths as soon as they see the letters 'OM' appear on a screen, responses are slower

when the letters are accompanied by an image of an opening hand than when they are

accompanied by an image of an opening mouth."

In a scientific first, Range a University of Vienna researcher in the Department of

Cognitive Biology and her team tested this phenomenon on dogs. Ten adult dogs of

various breeds and their owners, from Austria, participated in the experiments.

All of the dogs received preliminary training to open a sliding door using their head or a

paw. The dogs then watched their owners open the door by hand or by head. For the

latter, the owner would get down on the floor and use his or her head to push up or

down on the sliding door.

The dogs were next divided into two groups. Dogs in the first group received a food

reward whenever they copied what the owner did. Dogs in the second group received a

food reward when they did the opposite.

All of the dogs were inclined to copy what the owner did, even if it meant receiving no

food reward.

"This finding suggests that the dogs brought with them to the experiment a tendency

automatically to imitate hand use and/or paw use by their owner; to imitate these

actions even when it was costly to do so," the authors report.


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The scientists suggest owners would do well to match their own body movements,

whenever possible, to tasks at hand during training sessions.

For example, if an owner is trying to teach a dog to shake "hands," the person might

have more success if he stretched out his own hand to demonstrate. The observing dog

would then be inclined to stretch out a paw, mirroring what the human did. At that point,

a food reward could be offered to the dog, reinforcing the behavior.

The owner is reinforcing bonding and cooperation with the dog, too.

"Researchers have known that human beings prefer the behavior of other people who

subtly imitate their gestures and other affects," said Duane Alexander, M.D., director ofthe Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child and Human Development.

Alexander worked on another study showing that non-human primates automatically

imitate each other. Certain birds do this, too, but it may be very rare in the animal

kingdom for one species to almost subconsciously imitate the behavior of a completely

different species.

The dog-human bond may therefore have few, if any, parallels.

"Dogs are special animals, both in terms of their evolutionary history of domestication

and the range and intensity of their developmental training by humans," Range and her

team explain.

"Both of these factors may enhance the extent to which dogs attend to human activity,"

they added, "but the results of the present experiment suggest it is the latter training

in the course of development which plays the more powerful and specific role in

shaping their imitative behavior."

Copyright 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC. The leading global real world media andentertainment company.


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Wonder What Your Pup is Thinking