For most dogs, their friend groups usually consist of a mix of humans and other dogs. But Lili, a 3-year-old dog who lives on a French Polynesian atoll called Fakarava, isn’t like most other dogs. She prefers friends who have gills and fins. In fact, her very best friend is a shark.
Ever since Lili’s mom, Emmanuelle Larchet, adopted Lili, she’s known that her dog has an affinity for all things aquatic. She started swimming in the lagoon near Larchet’s house when she was only a month old.
“She’s really a water dog,” Larchet told The Dodo.
There are around 100 sharks who live in this lagoon near Larchet’s house. So when Lili swims in the water there, she’s surrounded by them. While many dog parents would be terrified to see their dog swimming amongst sharks, Larchet knows that the sharks Lili swims with are nurse sharks, who are actually very docile creatures.
“We call them sea puppies because [they’re] like dogs, actually … They are very nice,” Larchet said.
Larchet likes to joke that when Lili swims around with her shark friends, it’s sea puppies meeting earth puppies.
Over the years Lili has been swimming in the lagoon, there’s one shark in particular she’s grown especially close with. His name is Sharky, and he and Lili visit each other almost every day. Larchet and Lili are able to recognize Sharky because he has a special marking on one of his fins.
Lili and Sharky like to explore their lagoon together. They enjoy splashing around in the warm, clear water.
“He comes to say hello every time she sees him,” Larchet said.
Even though Lili and Larchet are best friends themselves, Larchet is more than happy to share her Lili with Sharky. And even though Larchet watches Lili hang out with her shark friends all the time, it never gets old seeing them spend time together.
“[When] I see her swimming with Sharky, [I’m] so happy,” Larchet said.
Ellie Woods’ family dog Bobby has always been an important part of her love story with her wife Georgie Woods. When Ellie brought Georgie home for the first time, the family member she was most anxious for Georgie to meet was Bobby.
When the couple got engaged and started planning their wedding, they decided it would be fun to try to document the wedding from Bobby’s unique perspective. So right before the ceremony started, they attached a GoPro to Bobby’s back and then set him loose.
For some dogs, walking around with a camera on their back might take some getting used to — but not for Bobby. He immediately felt comfortable.
“He loves being the center of attention,” Georgie told The Dodo. “He just loved it.”
Georgie and Ellie said having Bobby at their wedding was incredibly meaningful for them.
@SASHALEEPHOTOGRAPHY
“Animals are really important to queer couples,” Ellie said. “[I]t was so important to have him … as part of our big day.
When the newlyweds sat down to watch the footage Bobby had captured, what they saw surprised and delighted them. The GoPro had caught Bobby stealing hors d’oeuvres and even walking in on Georgie’s sister in the bathroom. While Bobby is an expert videographer, he is still a dog, after all.
Of course, Bobby’s camera recorded much more than shenanigans. Georgie and Ellie loved watching themselves walk down the aisle together from Bobby’s perspective.
“It captured some really special moments,” Ellie said. “[W]e couldn’t be happier for how it came out because it’s just so organic and such an interesting, different perspective.”
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Dogs are just incredible. As much as I have already said that, time and time again there comes a story that just reinforces that previous sentence.
When staff members and volunteers at Saving Hope Rescue noticed a box had been dumped on their property, their hearts sank. As they got closer, they saw the box had “puppies her” written on the side of it and had a feeling they knew who was inside.
Saving Hope Rescue
When they opened the box, the rescuers came face-to-face with a whole pile of all-white puppies. Even though their rescue was already at capacity, they knew they couldn’t turn their backs on the sweet little family. They put out a call for help to the community in order to get some support and began to get the pups settled in.
Saving Hope Rescue
As everyone at the rescue started getting to know the abandoned puppies, they realized that the pups had been hiding something: Apparently, they were all visually and hearing impaired to some degree.
“At first, they were all deemed blind and deaf,” Lauren Anton of Saving Hope Rescue told The Dodo. “Eventually, as time went by and they developed some more, we discovered that some puppies are more impaired than others.”
Saving Hope Rescue
It’s possible that this was the reason the puppies were abandoned in the first place, but it’s hard to know for sure. Either way, it didn’t change anything for the puppies’ rescuers. Even if they might need a little extra help, they were still members of the Saving Hope family.
As the puppies grew, their unique personalities began to shine through, and their rescuers were also able to start getting an accurate picture of their different abilities.
Saving Hope Rescue
“Mate is a good example of the slightly impaired puppies,” Anton said. “We don’t know how much she can see and hear, for sure, but we do know that she can hear being called, knows when we shake the food bag, and will approach people when called to come over … Koala, on the other hand, is much more impaired … We aren’t sure how much he can see. Maybe just shadows.”
Everyone is doing their best to get to know the puppies and their individual needs so they’ll know how to best help them as they grow. One thing is for sure though, the puppies are happy and thriving.
Saving Hope Rescue
“Over the last few weeks, they’ve gone from sleepy babies to rambunctious puppies,” Anton said. “They’re constantly playing and wrestling with each other. They’ve learned that human pets and snuggles feel nice, and they love to sleep in our arms.”
These puppies may have been abandoned, but now they’re getting the second chance they deserve.
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That is a beautiful story. Lauren and the staff are to be congratulated on doing what they did, and that was giving these puppies a new lease of life.
The drawing depicts a turbaned cavalry soldier facing off against an English dragoon. It’s a bit trippy: The British soldier sits astride a carrot, and the turbaned soldier rides a grape. Both carrot and grape are fitted with horses’ heads and stick appendages.
‘The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers,’ a drawing on the back of a manuscript page from Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species,’ attributed to Darwin’s young son Francis. Cambridge University Library, CC BY-ND
It’s thought to be the work of Francis Darwin, the seventh child of British naturalist Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma, and appears to have been made in 1857, when Frank would have been 10 or 11. And it’s drawn on the back of a page of a draft of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin’s masterwork and the foundational text of evolutionary biology. The few sheets of the draft that survive are pages Darwin gave to his children to use for drawing paper.
Darwin’s biographers have long recognized that play was important in his personal and familial life. The Georgian manor in which he and Emma raised their 10 children was furnished with a rope swing hung over the first-floor landing and a portable wooden slide that could be laid over the main stairway. The gardens and surrounding countryside served as an open-air laboratory and playground.
Play also has a role in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. As I explain in my new book, “Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself,” there are many similarities – so many that if you could distill the processes of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play.
Through natural selection, the rock pocket mouse has evolved a coat color that hides it from predators in the desert Southwest.
In contrast to foraging and hunting – behaviors with clearly defined goals – play is likewise undirected. When a pony frolics in a field, a dog wrestles with a stick or chimpanzees chase each other, they act with no goal in mind.
Natural selection is utterly provisional: The evolution of any organism responds to whatever conditions are present at a given place and time. Likewise, animals at play are acting provisionally. They constantly adjust their movements in response to changes in circumstances. Playing squirrels, faced with obstacles such as falling branches or other squirrels, nimbly alter their tactics and routes.
Natural selection is open-ended. The forms of life are not fixed, but continually evolving. Play, too, is open-ended. Animals begin a play session with no plan of when to end it. Two dogs play-fighting, for instance, cease playing only when one is injured, exhausted or simply loses interest.
Keepers noticed that Shanthi, a 36-year-old elephant at the Smithsonian national zoo, liked to make noise with objects, so they gave her horns, harmonicas and other noisemakers.
Play is likewise profligate. It requires an animal to expend time and energy that perhaps would be better devoted to behaviors such as foraging and hunting that could aid survival.
And that profligacy is also advantageous. Animals forage and hunt in specific ways that don’t typically change. But an animal at play is far more likely to innovate – and some of its innovations may in time be adapted into new ways to forage and hunt.
Competing and cooperating
As Darwin first framed it, the “struggle for existence” was by and large a competition. But in the 1860s, Russian naturalist Pyotr Kropotkin’s observations of birds and fallow deer led him to conclude that many species were “the most numerous and the most prosperous” because natural selection also selects for cooperation.
Scientists confirmed Kroptokin’s hypothesis in the 20th century, discovering all manner of cooperation, not only between members of the same species but between members of different species. For example, clown fish are immune to anemone stings; they nestle in anemone tentacles for protection and, in return, keep the anemones free of parasites, provide nutrients and drive away predators.
Play likewise utilizes both competition and cooperation. Two dogs play-fighting are certainly competing, yet to sustain their play, they must cooperate. They often reverse roles: A dog with the advantage of position might suddenly surrender that advantage and roll over on its back. If one bites harder than intended, it is likely to retreat and perform a play bow – saying, in effect, “My bad. I hope we can keep playing.”
River otters at the Oregon Zoo repeatedly separate and reunite while playing in a tub of ice.
Natural selection and play also may both employ deception. From butterflies colored to resemble toxic species to wild cats that squeal like distressed baby monkeys, many organisms use mimicry to deceive their prey, predators and rivals. Play – specifically, play-fighting – similarly offers animals opportunities to learn about and practice deception.
And since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may with some justification maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful.
Before I share the article with you, I felt I should mention that I haven’t found a link to share the Live Science item and it may need to be moved. We will see what happens.
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Dogs can smell their humans’ stress, and it makes them sad.
Dogs can smell when people are stressed, and it seems to make them feel downhearted.
A new study shows that dogs pick up on our emotions through their sense of smell. (Image credit: Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images)
Humans and dogs have been close companions for perhaps 30,000 years, according to anthropological and DNA evidence. So it would make sense that dogs would be uniquely qualified to interpret human emotion. They have evolved to read verbal and visual cues from their owners, and previous research has shown that with their acute sense of smell, they can even detect the odor of stress in human sweat. Now researchers have found that not only can dogs smell stress—in this case represented by higher levels of the hormone cortisol—they also react to it emotionally.
For the new study, published Monday in Scientific Reports, scientists at the University of Bristol in England recruited 18 dogs of varying breeds, along with their owners. Eleven volunteers who were unfamiliar to the dogs were put through a stress test involving public speaking and arithmetic while samples of their underarm sweat were gathered on pieces of cloth. Next, the human participants underwent a relaxation exercise that included watching a nature video on a beanbag chair under dim lighting, after which new sweat samples were taken. Sweat samples from three of these volunteers were used in the study.
Participating canines were put into three groups and smelled sweat samples from one of the three volunteers. Prior to doing so, the dogs were trained to know that a food bowl at one location contained a treat and that a bowl at another location did not. During testing, bowls that did not contain a treat were sometimes placed in one of three “ambiguous” locations. In one testing session, when the dogs smelled the sample from a stressed volunteer, compared with the scent of a cloth without a sample, they were less likely to approach the bowl in one of the ambiguous locations, suggesting that they thought this bowl did not contain a treat. Previous research has shown that an expectation of a negative outcome reflects a down mood in dogs.
The results imply that when dogs are around stressed individuals, they’re more pessimistic about uncertain situations, whereas proximity to people with the relaxed odor does not have this effect, says Zoe Parr-Cortes, lead study author and a Ph.D. student at Bristol Veterinary School at the University of Bristol. “For thousands of years, dogs have learned to live with us, and a lot of their evolution has been alongside us. Both humans and dogs are social animals, and there’s an emotional contagion between us,” she says. “Being able to sense stress from another member of the pack was likely beneficial because it alerted them of a threat that another member of the group had already detected.”
The fact that the odor came from an individual who was unfamiliar to the dogs speaks to the importance of smell for the animals and to the way it affects emotions in such practical situations, says Katherine A. Houpt, a professor emeritus of behavioral medicine at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Houpt, who was not involved in the new study, suggests that the smell of stress may have reduced the dogs’ hunger because it’s known to impact appetite. “It might not be that it’s changing their decision-making but more that it’s changing their motivation for food,” she says. “It makes sense because when you’re super stressed, you’re not quite as interested in that candy bar.”
This research, Houpt adds, shows that dogs have empathy based on smell in addition to visual and verbal cues. And when you’re stressed, that could translate into behaviors that your dog doesn’t normally display, she says. What’s more, it leaves us to wonder how stress impacts the animals under the more intense weight of an anxious owner. “If the dogs are responding to more mild stress like this, I’d be interested to see how they responded to something more serious like an impending tornado, losing your job or failing a test,” Houpt says. “One would expect the dog to be even more attuned to an actual threat.”
Sara Novak is a science writer based on Sullivan’s Island, S.C. Her work has appeared in Discover, Sierra Magazine, Popular Science, New Scientist, and more. Follow Novak on X (formerly Twitter) @sarafnovak
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Dogs are such perfect animals and Sara brings this out so well. As was pointed out in the article dogs have learned to live with us humans over thousands of years.
That’s the fire in California that is growing so quickly!
There are so many stories around about these dogs being rescued. I have chosen the YouTube video which is the CBS News, Chicago, presentation.
A homeowner was forced to leave their truck behind with the adult rottweiler and her puppies. The owner told rescuers where they were, but the intense fire blocked access to the truck. Several days later, rescuers spotted the dogs from a helicopter and landed to get them.
Learning from Dogs 