How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain Read Online Free PDF

we would haveto push on hot-button issues. Race, religion, sex, guns, abortion, gay rights—all the stuff you don’t talk about with the in-laws.
    We spent a year brainstorming the sacred values experiment, at least half that time wasted because nobody in the lab truly felt comfortable talking about these issues. Scientists or not, if you really push on what is sacred to people, you can be sure they’ll be offended.
    At some point, I think the lab realized that we weren’t going to make progress until we got better at suggesting ideas that might offend someone else. So it was with a determined effort that we became truly politically incorrect. That’s also how we really got to know one another. The team includes people of different sexes, sexual orientations, religions, races, political affiliations, even diets. Drawing on our own sacred values, we each compiled a list of the most offensive statements we could imagine and whittled them down. When we examined the brain responses to these statements, we found that the brain processes sacred values as rules—like the Ten Commandments. This was important because it explained why sacred beliefs are so resistant to change. They cannot be argued with, and they cannot be traded for money or other material things.
    Maybe it was some kind of cosmic premonition, but one of the issues we probed in the sacred values experiment was whether people identified themselves as a dog person or a cat person. I am not sure this is a good thing, but I have always categorized people this way. And if the answer was “neither,” then that was the worst of all.
    Against this backdrop of the sacred values experiment, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden was all over the news. As details trickled out, it was revealed that a dog had accompanied SEAL Team 6.
    This shouldn’t have been particularly surprising; dogs have been part of military units throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They are fixtures at border crossings and airports, and every urban police department has a K9 unit. But the fact that a dog hadhelped kill the most wanted man in the world was something special. It showed that dogs were not just companions. Even though it could have no understanding of democracy, a dog had helped defend a way of life.
    Like the human members of SEAL Team 6, the identity of the dog on the mission wasn’t revealed. But this anonymity just stoked the media firestorm. To satisfy the public’s appetite for details, the public relations arm of the navy released stock photos of military working dogs: A German shepherd wearing a bulletproof vest bounding through a stream. A Belgian malinois, in tandem with its handler, leaping off the ramp of a helicopter.
    The most touching photo was of a dog strapped to the chest of a soldier parachuting out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet, both wearing oxygen masks. The soldier cradled the dog with one arm while pulling the parachute release cord with the other. The closeness of the bond and the physical embrace really hit home for me: dogs and humans belong together. We couldn’t exist without each other.
    Prior to seeing those photos, I had been completely unaware that dogs had been trained to do such amazing feats. The noise from a helicopter is deafening. Most humans take some time to get used to it, and even then they wear heavy-duty ear protection. Obviously these dogs had been acclimated to some fairly hostile environments. Judging from the photos, they not only tolerated them, they enjoyed working in them with their humans.
    “Did you guys hear there was a dog on the SEAL team?” I asked at our Wednesday lab meeting. The team came over to one of the computers to see the images of the military dogs that had gotten me so excited.
    “That’s badass!” Andrew Brooks, the sole graduate student in the lab, said. Andrew had been in the lab for two years and was workingtoward his PhD in neuroscience. I liked him a lot. His parents were