This is John Batchelor, conversation with Jessica Pierce and Mark Bekhov, a book I value much,

a dog's world, imagining the lives of dogs and a world without humans.

Mark here speaks to dogs being adaptable and smart, and that the adaptation part of dog thinking has not been bred out of them because they're

man's best friend. I think of dogs often now because my family surprised me with a seven-month-old

springer spaniel for Christmas. Charlie. Charlie was the last of four boys in the kennel to go, and he is smaller, but extremely swift.

I have a five-year-old Springer Spaniel, a champion, Sailor, who is clearly the big brother of the two, and Charlie learns very

quickly from Sailor what is and what is not good, what is and what is not fun, what limits

there are with playing with Sailor, Charlie can fly, Sailor runs. And in thinking about dogs and adapting to a world without humans, that's the thought

experiment of the book of Dog's World, it wouldn't look much like Charlie and Sailor. They find a way

to work together, to hunt together, to sleep together, to live together, to be careful about the larger world around them.

We humans are a part of the challenge for them.

Charlie and Sailor teach me. It's a dog's world. And later on tonight, more from Jessica

Pierce and Mark Beckhoff. Imagining the lives of dogs in a world without humans.

I think of Charlie and Sailor. Four days into it, they're ready to go. More of this later

tonight. Excuse me. Well, as a biologist, I look at learning as being a form of adaptation.

They can learn. They can do a lot. I mean, a form of adaptation. They can learn.

They can do a lot.

I mean, a lot of lab studies that are done looking at how bright or how intelligent dogs are don't really tap into a lot of their potential

because they're being faced with very defined problems in a very controlled setting.

So having studied coyotes for thousands of hours in the field, they're really bright,

they're really adaptable.

They can live in all these different communities and do things that people are shocked to learn that they can do.

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