Alexandra Horowitz

Can a whale be gracious? Can a leopard seal fall in love with its photographer? That guilty look a dog gives you, does it really FEEL bad? What is it exactly are these animals thinking?

Alexandra Horowitz, director of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia University, talks about the rich interior lives of dogs and why we love them.

Alexandra Horowitz answers all your questions about cognition and behavior of (wo)man's best friend, the dog.

Alexandra Horowitz joins us to discuss her book "Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell."

We humans think we don't have a very good sense of smell. But psychologist Alexandra Horowitz says dogs can show us how to train our noses so they give us a window into a secret world.

Stop and smell the everything.

This interview originally aired live on January 31, 2013. An edited version was re-aired on August 9, 2013 as part of a special episode of The Brian Lehrer Show. 

Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology, animal behavior, and canine cognition at Barnard College and is the author of Inside of a Dog and now On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. She tells what she learned walking the city with "experts" -- including a geologist, an artist, and her dog.

 

For many of us, dogs are loyal friends and companions, but we know very little about how they see the world. On this week's Please Explain, we look at what we know about how dogs perceive the world and how dogs can be trained to help in search and rescue efforts.We’re joined by John Bradshaw, the Director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol and the author of Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet and Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Barnard College and Director of the Dog Cognition Lab and the author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know.

A story published this week reports that Chinese archaeologists have found nearly-intact mummies of people who lived in a desolate desert in Northwestern China nearly 4,000 years ago. But they were not Chinese. DNA evidence from these long dead people shows that they were in fact of European descent. Also this week, geneticists announced that man's best friend split from the wolves about 15,000 years ago in the Middle East.