Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens.

We're thrilled to talk with our guest on this episode, Canine Behaviorist Clive Wynn, who explores the incredible relationship between people and dogs in his new book, Dog is Love, why and how your dog loves you. Clive, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a thrill to be with you this afternoon. Tell us about your background and why you wrote the book.

I'm a psychology professor. I'm one of those rare psychology professors who's interested not so

much in the human mind, but in the minds of other species. And for a long time, I studied the

kinds of animals that people like me typically study, which is like rats and pigeons, small animals that

fit easily in a laboratory.

But there came a point where I wanted something more than that.

I wanted to break out of my little laboratory life, and I wanted to understand the mind

of an animal that's so crucial to so many people's lives, and to really get at the puzzle

as to how did this animal get to be so important to so many of us.

And so, I don't know, 15 years ago or so now, I quit the pigeons, I closed down the lab,

and I started studying the behavior of the animals that rested our feet, of the beautiful

dogs that we share our lives with.

So that's my sort of history in a nutshell.

What did you think originally about dogs in their capacity to love?

So when I started studying dogs, nobody talked about love.

You know, we're a little, we're a little scared of words like love for scientists, behavioral scientists.

You know, how do you measure love? What do we mean by love? It's a, it's, it's, it's part of

everyday language. It's not part of scientific language. So I never thought about it at all.

At first, at first I never thought about it. When I started studying dog behavior and how dogs

came to be so successful in human lives, people were saying that dogs had a special kind

of intelligence, that it was their smear that gave them this skill that was the secret of

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