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Wonder What Your Pup Is

Thinking?

Newsweek: Pets are increasingly seen as part of the family, so

more owners are looking to pet psychics & therapists for insight
into their lives.

Your dog may be taking advantage of you

Study: All dogs imitate their owners

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

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What’s Your Pooch

Thinking?
Pet ownership is at an all-time high, and spending on animals has
been increasing steadily despite a recession. Pet psychics may just be
the 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. Download
the 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 country’s World Cup win, people all over the world are becoming more
curious 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. “They’ll
always tell me everything that’s 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 it’s 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 wouldn’t 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. “They’re not
getting along, or [their animals] have a health issue. A lot of times people call because
their animals are dying.”

“A lot of it’s curiosity,” says Susan Hoffman Peacock, a dressage instructor and ranch
owner in Corona, Calif. “It’s justification for what you’re doing with the animals on a daily
basis, and to see if there’s 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 doesn’t need surgery, and he can, most of the time, feel his right front foot, and
he’s 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 don’t think most people expect a psychic to change everything you do with your
horse,” she says. “You’re 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 animal’s body, a lowering of its head, its
ears going back.

“Animals are communicating through pheromones,” Johnson says. “Veterinarians can

use their sense of smell—we use our eyes and ears, our sense of touch. Animals are
communicating a lot of the time, but we simply can’t 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 intellect—they’re
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 work—she 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 Grandma’s!
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 “didn’t want to talk about the dog,” she wanted to talk “with the dog.”

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Sometimes even scientists believe. About a year ago, Dr. Aleda Chen, a veterinarian in
Randolph, N.J., became a client of Plotzker’s after meeting the psychic at a pet expo.
“Wait!” Plotzker told her, “I’m going into psychic mode.”

“It was about my horse,” says Chen. “She said that my horse was coming through, my
horse who had passed away. And that he thanked me for being who I was and how I
treated him, and that there was nothing that I could have done, and it was the tumor he
had in his head. And I thought, huh. She couldn’t have known that.”

Did it make her cry? “Yes. It was so sad,” Chen says. “It was very sad. But it was a nice
kind of closure. It’s reassurance for the owner that they’re doing the right thing.”

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

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Dogs sneak food when

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

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 to
enjoy lunch, consider the clever, strategical intent of your rapt viewer. That's because
new 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 dogs
possess 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 take
advantage 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 phenomenon
out in a more structured, scientific way on 20 dogs. To do this, they gave the dogs the
opportunity to take food from one of two containers.

"These containers were located within the proximity of a human gatekeeper who was
either looking straight ahead or not looking at the time of choice," explained the
scientists. "One container was silent when food was inserted or removed while the other
was 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 food
container was noisy yet was still ignored by the nearby "gatekeeper," or if the dogs
weren'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 silently
only when silence was germane to obtaining food unobserved by the human
gatekeeper. Interestingly, dogs sourced from a local animal shelter evidenced similar
outcomes."

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

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Aside from giving some props to shelter dogs, the study suggests that the food nabbing
skills aren't necessarily learned through repeated experience. The sneakiness may
have evolved in wolves, the ancestors to dogs, and could therefore have genetic
components.

We humans may also have an inborn drive to take food away from our dinner mates
when they aren't looking. Have you ever grabbed a French fry, piece of sushi, or some
other small, yet tempting, item when a friend or relative has left the table?

Admittedly, I did that the other night. Sorry, Grace. The fried won-ton on your plate was
good.

Copyright © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC. The leading global real world media and
entertainment company.

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Dogs automatically imitate

people
Some dogs may look like their owners, but all dogs imitate their
human 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 at
hand 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 of
the 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 and
entertainment company.

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

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