08/08/2024
Excited to watch this! 🐶🤎🐾
Netflix‘s latest documentary, Inside the Mind of a Dog, explores what makes our furry friends tick, revealing how dogs connect and communicate with their owners while attempting to tackle the all-important question of whether they truly love their humans. 🐾
As the title suggests, Inside the Mind of a Dog comes from director Andy Mitchell following his earlier venture into the world of cats with 2022’s Inside the Mind of a Cat. This time, we are let into the minds of humans’ best friends and the various scientific and emotional insights about their relationships with their owners.
According to Dr Vanessa Woods, the director of the Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University, both humans and dogs rely on eye contact as a means of communication while also sharing what’s called the “love hormone.” When dog owners question what it means when their dogs stare lovingly at them, it often means that they’re experiencing a feeling of excitement and appreciation, or in scientific terms, a rush of oxytocin.
“There is a lot of what we call convergence between dogs and humans,” Woods explained to Salon. “Basically they’ve hijacked this oxytocin loop. When your dog stares at you and you stare back at your dog, it increases your oxytocin and it increases their oxytocin. They’ve taken over this neurological loop that we developed between our children and ourselves. And for another species to do that is quite extraordinary.”
The documentary, which is narrated by Rob Lowe, whose pets are also featured, explores the various ways owners can better understand their pets, including knowing which barks indicate a higher level of stress than others. For instance, if a dog is barking at a high pitch repeatedly, it is in a high state of distress. If the barks appeal higher in pitch but with pauses in between, the dog still has some cognitive ability.
The documentary also shows that dogs communicate with their tails to let owners know if they are agitated, anxious, curious, or excited. Despite dogs only having 16 facial expressions, as opposed to humans’ 27, they rely on their eyes, barks, and tails to communicate the emotions and messages that their faces can’t.
According to Dr Brian Hare, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, the documentary teaches viewers that, although dogs are commonly mistaken for simple pets without complex minds, the opposite is true.
“We now have overwhelming evidence that dogs have multiple intelligences — these different types of cognition already emerge in puppies but first appear at different times,” Hare explained. Adding: “Some cognitive skills appear early, like the ability to read human gestures, and other cognitive skills, like self-control, come online a bit later. Understanding how the puppy mind develops helps us manage our expectations of what puppies can do or learn while they are growing up.”
Inside the Mind of a Dog is currently streaming on Netflix.
