E109: 제시카 헤크먼(Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD.) - 개들의 두뇌를 움직이는 것

So hopefully we'll get back to agility. We'll see how that goes. Awesome. I know your background and your day-to-day work is a bit different than most of the other instructors at FDSA. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So what I'm really interested in is sort of what makes dog brains tick, like what's different in the brain of a dog who's really fearful compared to a dog who you could take anywhere, one of those sort of go anywhere, do anything dogs. So I work at a laboratory that studies pet dogs and we use citizen science to do it. So we don't go kidnap people's pet dogs and do things to their brains. What we do is we have a website, darwinsarc.org. And so people can come and they can answer a few hundred questions about their dog's behavior, which is actually more fun than it sounds. Sometimes while I'm watching the sight logs, I can see people just going through and just doing it all at once. And I'm always kind of amazed when people do that. And so then we can send them a saliva swab to get a sample of their dog's DNA. And then we sort of use that to try to figure out like what genetic differences are there in this dog that try to make its personality the way that it is. So yeah, so that's my job. Awesome. So what was it about research that kind of pulled you in? You know, what led you from kind of working to become a vet to choosing to dedicate your career instead to research and that piece of it? Yeah. And it's interesting that you say instead, because I consider myself a veterinary researcher. So I'm still working as a vet. I'm just in research instead of in a clinic. There's not that many of us around. And it's certainly true that veterinary school really emphasized clinical medicine. But I think of it as sort of a combination of the two rather than this one or that one. I actually was working as a computer programmer in the mid to late 90s when I got out of college. And because that was, they were just taking warm bodies and it was a lot of fun. It was a good job. I actually got to work from home most of the time with my dog, which was really nice. But I started getting bored and getting really interested in dog brains. And so even from the beginning, I was sort of like, well, what do I want to do? Do I want to be a vet or do I want to get a PhD? Like what's the best way to learn about dog behavior? And at the time, I talked to someone who was the closest I could get to an animal behavior researcher locally. He actually studied social insects, so not all that close to dogs, but he was the best I could get. And what he said was, well, researchers don't study dogs.

This was in 2005, right? Researchers don't study dogs. They're sort of a constructed species, so they're not interesting. You could study wolves or you could go be a vet and do medicine with dogs, but you can't really study dog behavior. And so partly because, and so, you know, what he said was sort of true at the time, that there weren't any labs doing that. And I figured if I became a vet, then I could prescribe meds and that would be a good, useful thing. So went to vet school. Halfway through, as you said, I got, I was doing this dual degree program. So I took the first two years of vet school and then I stopped to do my master's. And so that was the first time that I'd really gotten dug into research and sort of putting all of that together, you know, realizing that clinical medicine was not that interesting to me. Being a veterinary behaviorist and trying to fix dogs who were busted, not all that interesting to me. But doing research and trying to figure out why dogs get busted in the first place, super interesting. And so that was when I was like, well, damn it, I guess I need to do the PhD too. So I ended up doing that. Yeah. So I went basically straight from vet school to the PhD. I did do that internship, but I did not do any real practice in between. So then after my internship, I went to a PhD program. And so basically I'd been hiding out in vet school, waiting for the right program to come around and around is one way to think of it. And there still weren't any laboratories doing what I wanted to do with dogs, but there was a laboratory studying the Russian tame foxes who are such a great model for looking at anxiety in dogs. And so I was really lucky to get to go work in that laboratory. And then by the time I graduated, a laboratory doing exactly what I wanted to do in dogs had appeared. So I've just been very lucky that at each next step of my path, just the right thing has sort of appeared just in time. So now I'm working with Eleanor Carlson at the Broad doing exactly what we talked about just a minute ago. Oh, which reminds me, good job pronouncing Broad correctly. It's confusing to a lot of people. It took me a while to wrap my head around it. So it's named after the people who founded it and their names are spelled Broad, B-R-O-A-D, but it's pronounced Broad. And it's so hard to look at Broad and to say Broad, although now I do it naturally. And when people do it the other way, I'm like, ah, no. Well done. Thanks. If we could pause for just a second, you were talking about the tame fox thing.

And I think a lot of people probably their ears kind of peek up about that. Do you mind just going a little more into how that happened? I mean, how'd you wind up there and what you were kind of working on there? Yeah. Do you think most people listening to this sort of know who the tame foxes are or do you want me to give a quick overview? Can't hurt to give a quick overview. Yes. And I can do it super fast, which is that they are a population of foxes basically selectively bred to be super tame and friendly to people. They have been bred in Siberia for the past 40 or 50 years at this point. And there's a sister population of foxes bred to be very aggressive and fearful, also kept in the same place. So where I was working in Illinois, we didn't actually have foxes. We would work with like blood samples and brain samples and things like that brought over from Russia, which is getting them over. It was such a huge pain in the ass as it turned out. Yeah. And some of it's fox poop, which is a whole fun story all in and of itself. But so basically I had been stalking Anna Kukhekova for years. She had been working at Cornell studying these foxes and I tried to set up to do my master's with her and that fell through, but I'd been emailing with her. And so when I was ready to do a PhD, I got in touch and she said, oh, I just am starting my own lab off at University of Illinois. Come be my very first graduate student and we'll have this project for you to work on. And so I got to go and study what the difference is in the stress response between the tame foxes and the aggressive foxes. So we know unsurprisingly that the tame foxes have a much milder stress response. They don't make as many of the stress hormones. And so the question is sort of like, well, what's going on in the actual organs in the brain that are involved in that? Like what's different? And so I got to study that, which was super cool. That is super cool. Yeah, it was fun. So I think a lot of people think about science and are like, well, it's less fun than training. So as somebody who teaches science classes, why should people want to take a science class? Yeah, it's definitely a different thing, right? It's a lot less hands-on and it's a lot more in your head. My classes are structured not to be just dumps of science onto people. They're structured about helping people learn to think like a scientist sort of in the case when it's appropriate to do so, right? So obviously in a lot of your life, it's better not to be approaching everything suspiciously and demanding evidence and thinking through how that evidence was found.

But it turns out there's a lot of bad science floating around us out there on social media. And we're sort of just swimming in it. And most of us haven't had any real training in how to approach these claims that you see on Facebook all the time or these tiny little summaries of news studies that have come out. And you get this like sort of one-sentence summary of it and you're supposed to take something away from it. And so part of why I teach these classes is I really want to have a space for people to go try to get some practice learning how to deal with some of this stuff and sort of how to approach thinking through these things and what you want to take from it and what you want to believe and what you don't want to believe. It's giving people tools to do stuff like that. So my classes are very much structured in terms of go off and read this other resource and then I'll tell you sort of what my take on it is and then we'll talk about it. And so it's really about that and there's not a lot of other places out there for people to get that kind of practice and experience. And you guys did a science cafe that was kind of along those themes too recently, right? Yes, exactly. So Deb and Amy and I are all trying to provide those same tools for the same practice environment for FDSA students. So yeah, that was one example of how we did that. For anybody who's listening who wants to check that out, it's free. It's up on the FDSA blog. It's the recording of the conversation from that night. So it's totally worth going and checking that out. You can get the FDSA blog just by going to fenzydogsportsacademy.com forward slash blog and it'll pull the blog up. And then you can just find the science cafe there on the list. All right. Yeah, it was super fun to record. So hopefully fun for people to listen to as well. Yeah. Kind of to get into your syllabus a little bit here, you know, you're mentioning your class and I think you cover some really kind of interesting and applicable topics in your class. So not just about, you know, how do you look at the science? But, you know, one thing that kind of jumped out at me in particular was you were talking about how brain wiring changes during the socialization period. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So we all know the socialization period is super important for puppies. It's the time when their brains are just soaking in important information, making important associations, and that it's a lot easier during that time to teach them what's normal about the world.

And if you miss that window, it's a lot harder to do that important work later on. So the question that I try to address in that part is a couple of weeks in my class is what's different in their brains during socialization and why is that socialization window special sort of biologically? Like what is it that's going on there? And it turns out there's a couple different ways of answering that question. And one is that the way that neurons, brain cells interact with each other is really different during that window. They're making a lot of connections with each other in some ways that they don't do later on. So we talk about that in a lot of details. And then the other thing that's different is how the stress response works, that the hormones that are involved in the stress response are really tamped down during that early part of the socialization period. And that makes it a lot easier for puppies to interact with new things and not be scared of them because they don't have that same hormonal response going on. And so understanding the timing of how all this works in puppy brains is actually really helpful on a more practical level so that you can understand that how important the socialization work is done by the breeder or by the puppy's first home. And that some windows are already starting to close even by the time you bring the puppy home. So that has been something that people have taken away from the course as something that can help them change how they manage their dogs. So how has that kind of impacted what you've done with your own dogs? I know you kind of got Jenny when she's a little bit older, but I think you got Dash when he was pretty young. How have you applied it? Yeah, he was nine weeks old when I got him. And yeah, for sure. So I knew I wanted to get a puppy partly because I wanted to actually see the socialization period for myself. I'm interested in studying it and I felt like I should live through it. You know, I'm interested in an anxious dog. So I got an anxious dog that was Jenny. I'm interested in socialization. So I was like, well, I need to get a puppy. It's going to be my first puppy because I'd already had always had adult dogs before. And so it was really important to me, though, that he be super solid because Jenny was going to be helping me raise him. And Jenny, while she's so much better than she was, she's still quite anxious. And she will rocket up out of a sound sleep screaming that axe murderers are at the door. And that's hard for anyone to deal with.

But I was really worried that any puppy that I brought home during that really sensitive period would be taught by her that the world is scary. And so I really needed a really resilient puppy. And so I thought about what's the best way of doing that. And because I'd always gotten dogs from rescues and shelters before, that was the first place that I went to look. And I was really hoping that I'd be able to find a shelter puppy whose, you know, whose mom had been pregnant, but in the home of someone who was fostering her, not in the shelter. And that the puppy had gotten really good, solid start in life because I thought that was going to be really important. And I just, I kept finding these puppies that were like, oh, they came in and, you know, they were six weeks old and they were, you know, anemic from all the ticks that were on them. So they were in the ER for a couple of weeks. And I would just be like, Lord, no, those puppies are not going to be able to deal with Jenny at all. They're going to be, you know, need special work. And so I realized that it was just going to be super important to go get a dog from a breeder who had done that such important work of giving him a solid foundation early on. And also that I would be able to meet both parents and assure myself that the genetics going in were solid as well. So not to say that that is the course that everybody should take, but for my specific situation, I really felt that it was important. You needed to kind of stack the deck in your favor and know what you're getting into. Yeah, because Jenny was just going to sort of unstack it, right? So I needed some big guns going in for that. So then once you'd kind of decided you were going to stack the deck in your favor and you brought Dash home, like how did, you know, knowing the science impact what you did with him once he was on the ground? Oh, once he was on the ground. Yeah. Well, so continuing to work with him through his socialization period, sort of knowing when it ended. And then, well, I mean, another really important part of the class, I guess, is talking about spay-neuter decisions. And so I definitely took that into account when deciding whether to neuter him or not. So I had never lived with an intact dog before either.

But there's been some interesting research coming out lately suggesting that while we had always thought that neutering dogs, which is sort of this default way that we were going to do things, and everybody who was a responsible owner and not a breeder would obviously spay or neuter their dogs, some research has suggested that there may be some associations, some health risks of spay-neuter. And so as a result of that, obviously, as a lot of people know, a lot of people have started not neutering their dogs. And so that was sort of suddenly an option that was open. So I sat down with that research and really thought about it. And particularly when he hit sort of between six and nine months, he was a little holy terror, as people who've had dogs at that age, I'm sure know. And so he was humping everything in sight. And he would do things like attach himself to a female dog when we were out in public. And if he was off-least, she'd be like, OK, well, this is my woman now. And no one else can come near her and stuff like that that was just driving me around the bend. And so I did a lot of sort of thinking about, like, well, what would it mean, though, if I were to neuter him? Like, A, if I consider these behavioral issues, is my best bet to neuter him and hope that they will go away because of that? Or is my best bet to work on them from a management and modification perspective? So I took a look at what the science was out there on that. And then also, you know, what are the health risks going to be if I do neuter him? And so it's a lot to sort of think through. In the end, the answer, of course, is that while there's more and more studies coming out, we don't really solidly know what any of the answers are for or are saying. There's some correlations, but we just don't know exactly what's going on yet. And I think I came down basically on the side of, well, you can take the balls away, but you can't give them back. And so I sort of, you know, we got through the terrible teenage year and he's doing better now. And so, so far keeping him intact and happy with it. But, you know, if the time were to come when I were to feel like it were better to neuter him, I would also feel comfortable with that decision. You know, kind of looking ahead, what questions are you hoping that science will be able to help us answer in the next, you know, five to 10 years or a little bit longer if you want? Yeah, I would really love to better understand the risks of like, what is it genetically that makes dogs be at a higher risk of being really fearful or being really anxious?

And what's the biology in the brain that makes that stuff happen? You know, why do dogs turn out that way? And I don't honestly know if we'll get there in five to 10 years. It may be longer than that. But I really hope that we're sort of on the cusp of figuring out how to get at these traits like fearfulness that are just, they're so biologically complicated. And lots of people on the human side are working on exactly this. It's not just the laboratory where I work. And so the idea is that there's like these dozens of genes working together to affect your risk of developing anxiety. So it's super hard to begin to piece that system apart to understand it. And there are some tools that we have out there, which my laboratory is using, which people on the human side are using. We're not making super significant headway. We're sort of like chipping away at this mountain at this point. And so that's what I'm hoping that in the next five to 10 years that either we figure it out or that we figure out at least a different approach that will get us to be taking more faster steps rather than the little baby steps we're taking right now. Gotcha. So is there anything that you feel like we've kind of learned a lot about recently that you care to share? Well, you know, talking as I just did about how complicated it is to understand the genetics of traits like anxiety or friendliness or things like interest in toys or even the risk of cancer, things that we call complex traits. It's actually only been in about the last decade that we've started to realize how hard it is to figure all that stuff out. So just thinking back to like around 2000, when we first were able to read the first full human genome and we're able to like decode the DNA from one person entirely end to end. At that point, the thinking was sort of like, well, we're all set now, right? We'll just do this for a bunch of different people and then we'll compare all the differences and then we'll find the answers to things like why some people are more anxious than others or some people get cancer or diabetes or schizophrenia. And it actually took a while, partly because it took a while for the cost to come down enough that we could collect enough people to start realizing that doing those studies was not giving us the answers. We just kept not finding the genetic answers to those questions.

And people were really super surprised because we know that things like anxiety are actually influenced by genetics because we know that your risk for being anxious actually does have a lot to do with whether your biological parents are anxious or not anxious. And so people have been really perplexed about why we're not finding the answers. And so we're still not really sure, although we think it's because there's lots and lots of genes affecting these traits and that computers are just not powerful enough to untangle all those interactions that sort of like some genes make your risk for anxiety higher and some genes make your risk for anxiety lower. Some make the risk higher, but only if this other gene is set this particular way and otherwise it makes it lower. Like computers are just like – and for the thousands and tens of thousands of genes that we're looking at, computers are just not able to piece that all apart. And so I guess the answer is sort of the same to both questions. Like it's what I hope that we solve soon, but it also is a question that has really appeared really recently. Like why is this stuff so hard? What's going on? So yeah. All right. So we were talking about your class a little earlier. I kind of want to dive into that a bit more. You know, do you want to just talk about what you cover? Who should take it? What do people need to know? Yeah. Well, it's great for people who are thinking about getting a new dog and they want to think through sort of what kind of dog they want. So it's not just for people who want to get puppies. There's a lot about puppies in there. But if you want to get an adult, there's definitely useful stuff in there too. It's not just about deciding what breeder to pick or whether to neuter your dog. It's also about understanding the consequences for how those decisions were made, even if they were made for you. Because, you know, shelters will make those decisions for you. But it's still useful to understand, I think, what it means for the dog that you're living with. So we talk about the genetics of health in terms of the tradeoffs between getting a purebred or a sportbred mix or like a super mixy mix, a mutt who wasn't intentionally bred or versus like a dog from a more outbred breed and what all of that means. We talk about puppy brain development in really excruciating detail. And then we talk about spay and neuter, of course, like what we know about it, what we don't know about it, and how to go about making that decision.

So for somebody who has a young dog or is thinking about getting another dog and sort of wants to think through all of this stuff, that's pretty much the audience that it's designed around. Interesting. So that, I mean, that kind of, you know, whatever point in the process you're at in terms of getting a new dog, it kind of sounds like it'll guide you through the things you need to think about before a puppy comes home or before a dog comes home to make decisions. Yeah. The important things. Even if it's in your future, like a year in the future, it can help you to sort of think through like, well, when I'm ready to do that, how am I going to do it? Like, you know, so we all like thinking about our next dog, I think. And I'm several years away from my next dog, but I'm definitely already sort of playing with who would it be? What would I get? Yep. I get that. We definitely all like to think about that. It's like Christmas every day. Yep. So final question here. What's something that you've learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dogs and science? So I was actually spending all week thinking about how to answer the question you always ask about training. And now you ask me about science instead, which is very cool because I am. I'll let you answer both. I know. I could be like, no, I'm going to answer that training question. But I'm not at the level of the other trainers as you interview. So it was going to be super embarrassing. Like, oh, yeah, I figured out something basic recently. But yeah, but science. So actually, this thing came up today. It really has nothing to do with dog sports. But I was reading about how a coworker of mine did some important work helping with conservation of red wolves. So this is a super cool population of animals. They developed from intermixing wolves and coyotes like either hundreds or thousands of years ago. And so now they're sort of their own species based on both wolf and coyote. And they've been very, very close to going extinct. They're only about 17 of them at one point a few years back. And so people are trying to figure out how to save them and reintroduce them back into the range that they had been in, sort of North Carolina area. But it turns out that as they've been reintroducing them, there's so few red wolves already there for them to mate with that the animals that are being reintroduced end up mating with coyotes. Because they're part coyote, right? And so the project is failing because dogs and wolves like coyotes are so willing to interbreed with each other.

And so it's so fascinating to me, right, that as humans, we put our labels on what a species is and what we want to preserve and how we want to preserve this thing that we've labeled red wolves. And we have this idea that they should mate with other things that we think of as red wolves in the species that we've defined. But instead, these really incredible and adaptable animals are out there finding their own solutions, which are not the solutions we want them to find. Which actually maybe brings us back to dogs, right? Because our dogs are doing that all the time in our houses, finding solutions that we don't want them to find to I'm bored or I'm hungry or I need exercise or stuff like that. So it's cool. It's this sort of ongoing thing that I've been keeping an eye on for the last few years being like, how's this going to work out? And it's just a very interesting situation out there. Yeah, for sure. So I'm kind of curious now what your two basic training reminder there was. Oh, no. I thought I got out of it. Can I convince you to share? Yes. If people don't judge me too much, I've had two different trainers in the last couple of weeks who I've been working with have explained to me the whole concept of click for behavior and feed for position. And so I'm just, as I said, I'm trying to be better about shaping and better about exactly what to mark. And I was doing that sort of classic beginner's mistake of waiting for the dog to sort of complete the behavior and stand there being like I'm done and clicking that rather than clicking while the dog was in motion. And so I've had this problem with Dash where I just, you know, he's very slow and he doesn't like to sort of complete the motion that I'm trying to get him to complete. And I'm like, oh, well, if you click a little bit earlier before he's done moving, then things will go better. Amazing. Amazing. So that's where I've been the last week or so. But we've been making good progress since I figured that out. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Jessica. This has been great. Yeah, it's been so much fun. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Elaine Lawler, to talk about herding and living with intact dogs. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice. They have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast.

Music provided royalty-free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in. And happy training.