 Thank you very much. Hello, I'm Clive Wynn, Director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. When I was a kid, we had a dog. Benji was his name. There wasn't really anything that remarkable about Benji. He was just an ordinary, smallish, brownish, blackish shelter mutt. He stole any food we left out. Sometimes he disappeared for days on end. He was one naughty boy. But there was one thing about Benji that kept us loyal to him. He loved us. When my brother and I came home from school, we would plonk ourselves down on the sofa, and we would hear and then see Benji charging in from the back garden. About ten feet back from us, he would launch himself up into the air and he'd land on our shoulders and heads, and he'd thwack us with his happy wagging tail and kiss us, and all three of us would squeal in delight to be reunited. That was the special thing about Benji. He didn't keep his love buttoned up. It shone out of every pore in his little body. I grew up on the Isle of Wight, an island about 25 miles long, 15 miles wide, off the south coast of England. I went to college in London, and I got my PhD at Edinburgh University in Scotland. I was thrilled to find that there was such a thing as the scientific study of animal minds. What kinds of intelligence do different species have? How are they like us, and how are they different? In any decent university, the Psychology Department has at least a couple of people studying the intelligence of other species. Usually the animals they study are pretty small. They have to fit into the space available. Animals like rats and pigeons. Early on I got bitten by a rat, so I mainly concentrated on pigeons. But I found my interest in animal behavior bursting beyond the bounds of what I could study in a lab. I realized I wanted to not just understand animal behavior, but understand the relationship between people and other species. And I couldn't really do that with pigeons. I cast around for an animal that would let me realize the full range of what I wanted to understand about human-animal relationships. And I have to admit that in retrospect it could have taken me so long to figure out that I needed to be studying dogs. Dogs have tremendously rich behavior. There are dogs that sniff out cancer and contraband. There are dogs that know the meaning of hundreds of words. There are dogs that help blind people cross busy city streets. Dogs have amazing behavior. But more than that, for anyone interested in people's relationships with animals, there is no animal with which people have had such a rich and long relationship as the dog. Dogs and people have been living together for well over 10,000 years. Of course, I wasn't the first psychologist to think of studying dogs. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? After a long absence from science, in the early 2000s, dogs were making a comeback. The new wave of dog psychological research wasn't interested in why dogs might slobber when somebody rings a bell. These new scientists had bigger fish to fry. Early in this new century, scientists started claiming that dogs, because of their domestication in close proximity to people, had developed new forms of intelligence not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom. These scientists argued that dogs had evolved to understand human actions and intentions, much as how we understand each other. Furthermore, they argued that these abilities were apparent in the youngest pups that they could test, and that no other animal, not even the wolf, which is the ancestor of all our modern dog breeds, or the chimpanzee, which is our human closest ancestor, none of these other animals could achieve what dogs could do. Now at first, the studies my students and I carried out confirmed what these other scientists have found. We too found that if you point at a container on the ground, your dog will go to the location that you have pointed to. We too found that if you give a dog a choice of two people to beg from, one person who can clearly see the dog, and another person whose back is turned, we also found that the dog will choose to go to the person who can see him. In both these simple experiments, which you can easily try for yourself at home, we found that dog successes were taken to mean that the dogs understood that people have minds. Just as we understand, and our children, even at a very early age, understand that different people have different contents in their minds and know and understand different things, these experiments were taken to show that dogs, uniquely among all species, share this human ability to understand what other individuals have in their minds. Now this made dogs completely unique among all the animals that have been tested. Our own view of the things that dogs can do began to change when we branched out from just testing people's pets. First, we were invited to Wolf Park in Indiana to test hand-reared wolves. Testing wolf behavior is tremendously important in this project if we want to understand what domestication has done to dogs because all dogs are descended from wolves. To our very considerable surprise, the wolves at Wolf Park were every bit as good in these tests as anybody's dog that we had tested. At first this was all very controversial, but gradually other research groups have confirmed that hand-reared wolves can be just as good at following human actions and intentions as are any dogs. So this showed that whatever dogs are doing, it was not something that was bred into them during domestication because their wild relatives can do it too. Then people started studying more species, more diverse species, and there was quite considerable success with these other animals. We ourselves carried out a study on bats, hand-reared bats, were just as good at following human pointing gestures as were dogs, as were wolves. This and many other studies on many other species showed that what matters for success on these kinds of tasks is how the animal is raised and not what species it belongs to.