LinkedIn Presents

I'm Rufus Criscom, and I'm Caleb Bissinger, and this is the next big idea today, the

surprising science of animal intelligence.

Are you a dog guy, Rufus?

You know, Caleb, I like dogs. I was highly allergic as a child, and this caused me to become

suspicious of the eye-feed you love me relationship. But then we got a dog, patting

it in cue dog, and I loved him, and now my kids are campaigning for a dog. We live in the city,

I don't know what to do. Well, you know, for most of my life, I shared your suspicion of dogs.

I just found them, this is kind of controversial, but I just sort of found them to be

annoying, right? I understand. They bark, they shed, they roll around a dead stuff,

and this kind of canine apathy that I've practiced for a long time started to cause some real

problems for me when I moved in with a bonafide dog lover. Yeah, that's tricky.

Like my girlfriend and I will go and walk together, and I would see a dog coming and start to cross

the street. And meanwhile, she would like bolt ahead to go pet it. She just lost dogs, and after

these encounters, she would come back and she'd remind me that like she really wanted to get a dog

one day, and I'd tell her, oh, you know, it's pretty hard with our jobs, or we don't really have room.

But then came the pandemic, and we found ourselves working from home in a dog friendly apartment.

And when she said, I think we're ready for a dog. I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her.

So May 14, 2020, which happens to be my girlfriend's birthday, we rescued a dog and named her Cisco.

We knew very little about her. She'd been found wandering around in the high desert of Southern

California, and the folks at the adoption agency said she was probably about six months old.

So there I was about to go from being someone who basically had no interest in dogs

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