About Puppies Demo Article

Puppies are hard-wired to appeal to us, with their adorable squishy faces, little paws, and wet noses. But there is more to young dogs than downy fur and floppy ears. Here are 12 scientific facts about them to coo over:

1. THEY LIKE BABY TALK.

A January 2017 study found that puppies respond when humans speak in sing-song tones, but adult dogs couldn’t care less. Researchers from the University of Lyon at Saint-Etienne found that people speak more slowly and at a much higher pitch when talking to puppies (or pictures of them, at least) than when talking to humans or adult dogs. When the researchers played recordings of participants’ puppy talk to dogs, they found that the puppies showed greater responses to the cooing than to recordings of humans using their regular (human-directed) voices. Adult dogs, on the other hand, did not. It’s hard to say why that is, but it could be that puppies are wired to respond to high-pitched sounds, but they eventually grow out of it.
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2. THEY CAN HELP YOU FOCUS.

Looking at cute pictures of puppies at work is more productive than you’d think. In a 2012 study, Japanese researchers found that viewing pictures of puppies made people better at tasks that required close attention. Viewing pictures of older dogs, however, was not as effective. People were more effective and more careful in accomplishing the tasks before them if they were flooded by the positive emotions of seeing an amazingly adorable baby animal. The researchers suggest that maybe people should look at cute things before driving or at work to help them focus.

3. THEY REALLY DO LIKE YOU.

In a Hungarian study published in 2005, researchers found that pet puppies show specific attachments to the humans that care for them. While even wolves that had been hand-raised from birth by humans didn’t show any preference for the people that raised them—they reacted the same way to strangers as to the caregivers they had spent their entire lives with—domestic puppies as young as 4 months old showed a significant preference to their owners. They followed and greeted their owners more than they did strange humans, and when their owner left, they tended to stand by the door waiting for them to return. This difference was observed in both puppies that had been hand-raised with extensive socialization and puppies that had been reared in a litter by their mothers, indicating that as a species, dogs have evolved to bond with their human owners.

4. THEIR SENSES DON'T DEVELOP UNTIL A FEW WEEKS AFTER BIRTH.

When they’re first born, puppies only respond to warmth, touch, and smell. Their eyes remain closed, and they can’t hear. Puppies don’t fully develop the ability to hear until they are 4 weeks old, and it is not until 6 weeks of age, on average, that they develop full vision. Once their senses develop, they begin exploring the world in earnest, beginning a critical period of socialization.

5. IT'S IMPORTANT TO FAMILIARIZE THEM WITH PEOPLE EARLY.

Studies [PDF] have shown that puppies are most socially malleable during their second month of life. During that time, their sensory systems are developed enough to let them explore, but they’re not yet fearful of new experiences. As one 1961 study on puppy litters isolated from humans found, puppies that aren’t played with showed "increasing tendency to withdraw from human beings after 5 weeks of age and unless socialization occurred before 14 weeks of age, withdrawal reactions from humans became so intense that normal relationships could not thereafter be established."

6. THEIR PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT VARIES BY BREED.

Puppies don’t all develop on the same timeline. A 2015 study of almost 100 purebred dogs found that different breeds of dogs develop a sense of fear at different times in puppyhood. The researchers put puppies from 4 weeks old to 10 weeks old through several tests designed to provoke a fear response, like making them listen to a loud bang or explore a seesaw. They found that Cavalier King Charles spaniels didn’t show fear-related behavior (like crouching down) until later than German shepherds or Yorkshire terriers. While German shepherds typically began showing a fear response around 35 days old, the spaniels didn’t start avoiding scary stimuli until 55 days old.

7. THEY LEARN TO UNDERSTAND HUMAN GESTURES AS THEY AGE.

Dogs can understand human social cues like pointing, but it’s something that they learn over time. In 2007, researchers tested 6-, 8-, 16-, and 24-week-old puppies [PDF] on their ability to decode a human’s finger point. Though these researchers reported that dogs of all ages could understand the cue and use it to find food under a cup, subsequent analysis by another research group showed that actually, those skills improved over time [PDF]. The older the dogs were, the better they were able to understand the pointing and suss out the correct cup. In itself, the act of testing seemed to help them learn, too. The youngest puppies showed improvement between the first half of their trials and the second half, the 2008 follow-up analysis found.

8. THEY DON'T CRY AS MUCH AS ADULT DOGS.

Dogs aren’t born with very moist eyes. One 2012 study found that 4-week-old puppies do produce basal tears, but in much smaller quantities than adult dogs. Their eyes get wetter every day, finally reaching adult levels of tears at about 10 weeks old. By contrast, full-term human babies have eyes which are just as wet as those of adults, unless they’re born premature, in which case they have lower secretions of tears until a few weeks later. (These are just the tears that keep eyes moist, not the psychological kind.)

9. THEIR LITTER SIZE DEPENDS A LOT ON BREED.

How many puppies a dog has varies by breed. While a 2011 review of birth data from 224 dog breeds found that the average purebred dog litter consisted of five or so puppies (5.4, to be exact), older and smaller dogs tend to have fewer puppies. Rhodesian Ridgebacks gave birth to the most puppies (an average of 8.9 puppies per litter), while toy Poodles and Pomeranians gave birth to an average of 2.4 puppies at a time.

10. THEY'RE NOT ALWAYS PLANNED.

In one of the first benchmark studies on pet population trends in the U.S., researchers found that 43 percent of puppy litters in 1996 were unplanned—about 2.6 million compared to 3.38 million planned litters. That’s a lot less than the whopping 83 percent of kitten litters that were unplanned.
11. THEY CAN BE IDENTICAL TWINS.

In 2016, a veterinarian encountered what is thought to be the first verified instance of identical twin puppies. When South African vet Kurt de Cramer performed a C-section on a pregnant Irish wolfhound, he discovered that two male puppies shared the same placenta. Later, he had their DNA tested and confirmed that they were, in fact, identical twins.

12. THEIR BEHAVIORAL TRAITS AREN'T SET YET AT 8 WEEKS OLD.

A long-term study of 1235 German shepherd puppies bred at the Swedish Dog Training Center in the late 1970s and early 1980s found that at 8 weeks old, a dog’s personality is not yet developed enough to analyze. The researchers wanted to know if suitability tests for guide dogs and other working dogs could be accurately performed on puppies as young as 8 weeks old. They found that at that point, puppy behavior is still changing rapidly, and test results from that young wouldn’t reveal much about the future behavior of the dog as an adult. In other words, it’s O.K. if your puppy is an idiot (or rambunctious, or whiny)—he’ll grow out of it, hopefully.

You may be confident that your dog would save you from a burning building, but until recently, there wasn't much science to back you up. A new study reported by The New York Times takes a deeper look at the canine capacity for empathy. "Timmy’s in the Well: Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs," published in the journal Learning & Behavior, suggests that the compulsion to help a human in distress may not be universal in dogs, but it is present in some.

For the study, researchers at Macalester College in Minnesota recruited 34 mature dogs. The test subjects varied in size and breed: The one thing they had in common was that they all had human owners. Their humans were shut away in a room with a window and a magnetically sealed door that could easily be opened with a nose or paw. To see what it would take for the dogs to break in, researchers told the owners to either hum, say "help" in a neutral tone, or say "help" while sounding distressed and crying.

The results indicate that not every dog has what it takes to be a hero. Only half of the dogs opened the door to reach their humans, and they were no more likely to act when their owners called for help than when they hummed a song.

But that doesn't necessarily mean your dog wouldn't feel empathy if it saw you in danger. When dogs did open the door, they reacted more quickly to the distressed sounds than the happy ones. And many of the dogs that stayed put still exhibited signs of stress when they heard their owners crying. In fact, they were even more anxious than the dogs who sprang into action, suggesting they may have been paralyzed by fear.

This reflects what other researchers have observed in humans: The people who acutely relate to the pain of someone in peril can be less likely to help them.

The study authors write:

    "Based on this result, it appears that adopting another’s emotional state through emotional contagion alone is not sufficient to motivate an empathetic helping response; otherwise, the most stressed dogs could have also opened the door. One must both adopt that emotional state then suppress their own distress, as openers in the distress condition in contrast to non-openers seem to have done, before they are capable of providing help."

But if your dog doesn't come to your rescue right away the next time you cry out, don't automatically assume it's too overwhelmed with empathy to act. There were also dogs in the study that didn't show any stress at all or make any effort to open the door when faced with their crying owner.

Chances are that the only time your cat will seem like they’re in any real distress is when they’re forced to deal with a trichobezoar, a soggy clump of undigested fur better known as a hairball. As domestic cats groom themselves, tiny papillae on their tongues act as bristles, catching loose hair and sweeping it away from their bodies. Some of this hair often winds up being swallowed before the cat coughs or retches it up in a somewhat unnerving display of kitty regurgitation.

At zoos or on YouTube, you may have seen cats of a different stripe—tigers, lions, and other wild animals—perform a similar huffing, heaving action. Do big cats get hairballs, too?

Not really. According to Natalia Borrego, a research associate at the University of Minnesota Lion Center, her subjects aren’t prone to hacking up tumbleweed-sized hairballs even though they perform the same grooming rituals as smaller cats. Borrego told National Geographic that while there’s nothing in their physiology that would prevent them from developing one in or out of captivity, it’s simply not a common observation.

Smaller wildcats under care, like servals and ocelots, might be more prone to hairballs since their diet includes commercial foods. Jaguars, leopards, and other cats stick to meat. Some experts believe processed food diets might contribute to digestive conditions leading to hairballs, which might be one reason a large animal’s farm-to-table preferences mean a lower risk of developing the clumps.

When big cats do develop them, they can be massive. In recent years, one lion and one tiger in captivity developed hairballs so large—four pounds in size—they had to be surgically removed. They were simply too big to be passed on their own.

So what’s really happening when you see a lion chuffing with its mouth open? It’s probably not dislodging a hairball. Lions and other big cats use their voice box to make contact calls or roars that might be mistaken for coughing.

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