Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology, is opening the Duke Canine Cognition Center within the next two weeks. Hare and his team will test hundreds of dogs brought in by eager owners. Time magazine featured the team this week. The Chronicle’s Emily Stern sat down with him to discuss his inspiration for the project.
The Chronicle: How did you get involved studying dogs?
Brian Hare: The short version is that I had dogs as a kid. When I was growing up, my dog’s name was Oreo, and Oreo used to love to play fetch - and he could get three balls in his mouth, and so what that meant was that he would put all his balls on the ground - his slobbery balls on the ground, he would want you to throw all the balls, but sometimes you would throw them in different directions and they would get lost. I had seen that when his balls got lost when you were playing fetch with him that you could tell him where they were and he could go find them.
Later, when I was studying as an undergraduate, I realized together with my adviser that studying dogs would be really interesting because it ends up that they were doing some stuff that primates aren’t doing in terms of using human’s social cues, for instance, paying attention to pointing gestures that I’d seen my dog as a kid doing.
TC: What can canine behavior tell us about human behavior and evolution?
BH: What’s neat about dogs is that they’re all the same species and they’re very closely related genetically, but then they’re very, very different - each breed is very, very different. And so, that’s really fun and interesting because you can compare different breeds and try to understand why they’re different and why they’re similar than other breeds. And if by doing breed comparisons you can try and get an idea of why it is that some dogs can solve problems that other dogs can’t.
Ultimately, what I’m trying to study, as an evolutionary anthropologist, is human evolution, but there are not that many good models, there’s not that many good ways to study animals and understand how evolution changes cognition. So you can study an animal - I studied Chimpanzees and I studied Bonobos, and we study Great Apes, and Great Apes are really interesting and good because they can teach you how were similar and different from them and you can figure out how we changed, meaning what changed. But dogs are really useful because they can tell you how cognition changed, like what’s the process because you can compare lots of different breeds and figure out why it is that they became the way they were because there are so many of them but they’re all so closely related. So, it’s a really nice model for studying behavioral evolution, cognitive evolution, and they’re very unique that way. So it’s very useful, actually.
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