The Heart & Science of Dog Rescue: Exploring the Human-Canine Bond

In this episode of The Human-Canine Alliance, Stacie explores the powerful connection between humans and dogs, highlighting both grassroots rescue efforts and groundbreaking scientific research. She spotlights inspiring initiatives like Police Helping Paws and Eric and Joey—Instagram accounts making a real impact—while diving into a special edition of TIME Magazine, How Dogs Think: Inside the Canine Mind.

Did you know that a dog's brain has 40 times more space dedicated to smell than a human’s? Or that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led Congress to mandate disaster preparedness plans that accommodate pets? These fascinating insights shed light on the deep-rooted bond we share with our canine companions.

Stacie also shares a heartfelt story about her dog, Blue, and provides an exciting update on Toto—a rescue dog now in foster care with hopes of a forever home. Plus, she’s offering free promotional support to rescues and fosters struggling to place dogs—if you have a hard-to-place pup, reach out to THCA for podcast and social media exposure!

Resources used for this episode:

• TIME Magazine, "How Dogs Think: Inside the Canine Mind"
• FEMA's Key Planning Factors for Service Animals and Household Pets
• Burke County Animal Services
• @Police_Helping_Paws
• @Eric.and.Joey

Chapters

• 0:26 Exciting Update on Toto!
• 1:26 THCA Moves to the West Coast
• 3:24 Highlighting Homegrown Rescue Efforts
• 5:09 Scientific Insights into Canine Cognition
• 11:50 Dogs' Superhuman Sense of Smell
• 14:09 Personal Anecdote: Blue's Instincts
• 16:35 Genetic Links to Canine Social Behavior
• 19:45 Free Promotion for Rescues & Fosters

Transcript

Hey everyone, it's Stacie with The Human Canine Alliance and today's going be a little bit of a hodgepodge of different things related to The Human Canine Alliance, and you'll understand why as I start to unpack it. So per usual, I'm just gonna go forward. 

The first thing I have for today, which I'm super excited about is I have an update on Toto! 

He has been placed by Burke County Animal Services in Morganton, North Carolina to be fostered by a family, and with the intention of being adopted. How exciting is that? It makes my heart so happy. 

And I just want to let you know, if you are a rescue organization or a foster animal parent out there, I would love to offer free advertising on my podcast and my social media channels to the rescues that you are finding harder to place. 

Onto our next topic here at The Human Canine Alliance. This is a topic that is really more for the Real Life Business series, however, I just feel like it's appropriate that I talk about it a little bit now here on this episode because it's what's happening in my real life, and this is my platform, and so I feel like I should share it now. 

As of February 2025, The Human Canine Alliance has moved to the West coast.

We are now located in California.

And let me just tell you, I don't know what my voice sounds like, but I am not a 20-year-old chick anymore. Let me just say In the last month of moving to California, and believe me, that has been a hodgepodge in and of itself.

We drove out here from east coast to west coast with what we could fit in our car including our dog and lived in his parents' garage for a few weeks until we found our own place, which now we're in this great studio apartment with a 20 foot deck that overlooks Moss Landing Harbor and highway one and there is a sheep and a goat.

Their names are Annie and Phoebe, if you are interested. 

We're in this great spot, but in the last month I have not really been able to prioritize The Human Canine Alliance the way I would like to. However, I have definitely been paying attention to anything Human Canine Alliance related that's in my surroundings that I happen to notice.

And I've been taking note so I felt like this would be a good time to share those things because I just wanna keep driving awareness to those who are really trying to help rescue dogs get out of this hole. Well, dogs in general get out of this undervalued position in our society. That's a lot of what The Human Canine Alliance is really trying to do here.

As we grow and a little bit more solidified in what we're doing, I'm really starting to understand that the niche The Human Canine Alliance can bring to the rescue industry is to help society understand the value of dogs in general. So that's what we're doing here today.

The first one I wanna mention is an Instagram channel called Police Helping Paws, and I assume they're out of Pennsylvania because their bio on Instagram says, rescue police, canines, ACE and Jack are the first two fully certified pit bull canines in PA history. And now we are helping shelter dogs find great homes too.

So Ace and Jack. They were rescue dogs that were not getting re-homed. If you watch their Instagram reels and their different channels, they were rescue dogs that had been, tried to be homed three or four times and always returned. And so they were probably had it for euthanasia or just for basically cages the rest of their lives.

Right? And so this police force decided to adopt them and train them to be canine units. I mean. Ace and Jack. The first two fully certified pit bull canines in PA history. What more do you need? Follow their Instagram Police. Helping. Paws.

my next one is also an Instagram channel. Uh, Don't worry, I'll also link these in my show notes, so you can just go click into them. You don't have to actually try to find them. so Eric and Joey is their tag name and they're doing all sorts of unconventional things in the rescue world.

But what caught my attention was they have like a. Series or a campaign in their Instagram that's called Running with Shelter Dogs. Nobody wants to adopt. They just go into the rescue centers and they say, Hey, can I take a dog for a run? How simple is that?

And how great is that? And how exciting is that for any rescue dog to just get taken out? And I believe they just take 'em for like a mile, at a time.

And then last, but definitely not least, I actually saved this one because there's some real meat to it. A Times Magazine special edition, which actually came out in 2015. I'm not even kidding you guys. The name of the special edition is How Dogs Think. Inside the Canine Mind, and I saw it on the rack when we got out here to California. 

It was like the first couple of days we were here, and I was like, are you serious? Are you kidding me? I just feel like it was another sign that I was supposed to keep going in this direction because. It's just so apparent that topic is on people's minds and it's so obvious that humans in general, our societies in general, we are so curious about dogs and animals in general.

Right. But like dogs specifically, because they're so integrated into our society and they're so human-like we say that so many times in so many different ways. And there's a lot of reason for it. 

I'm learning that through this Times special edition that really dives into the understanding of dogs, their cognitive processes, emotions, behavior, drawing on the latest research from the fields of animal cognition, psychology, and veterinary science.

Okay, so one of the first things I learned in this special edition of Time Magazine was how far back the human canine connection goes. Did you know it goes back 15,000 years? That was more than surprising to me, and I don't mean like a working relationship. I mean an emotional connection, like an emotional bond. 

The word puppy is thought to have been adapted from the French word poupee or doll. Folk stories were populated by dogs. The Africans spoke of Rakuba, the dog who brought us fire. 

The Welsh told of the faithful Hound Gurt, who saved a Prince's baby from a wolf. Aristocrats took to including the family dog in family portraits and wealthy eccentrics took to including dogs in their wills. Now, I'm pretty sure that's something happening today and that was happening 15,000 years ago, you guys, that's not a working relationship with a dog, right? 

That is a connection that is a bond. And I have so much more information to share with you. And it's on a scientific basis. It's very exciting to me because it's just not information I was aware of. I don't think it's really mainstream information that canines are being studied in the way that they're being studied and they're finding gene related connections between the human and the canine. 

Stick with me here. We're going on break just for a minute. Be right back.

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Welcome back to The Human Canine Alliance. I am Stacie, and we're gonna cut right into it. We're gonna start talking about the scientific backing of how and why humans and canines have such an intimate bond and why they have had that for 15,000 years, 15,000 years, you guys, okay.

Why are we not in a better place with humans and canines and the roles that they play in society if they have been such an emotional connection to the human for 15,000 years? Okay, what did I just say? I'm gonna open up with science and I literally opened up with emotion. My bad. 

Animal research facilities have been around as early as the 1930s and forties, and they have played major roles in understanding the cognition levels of canines. However, it wasn't until the 1970s that the Canine Behavior and Cognition Lab was first established. They're one of the earliest university based facilities to study dog behavior in a more systematic and scientific way.

But it was really not until the 1990s. That research on dogs has become more prominent and organizations have been established just to study dogs, just to study canines, not animals as a whole. 

in 1994 The Family Dog Project in Budapest, Hungary, was one of the earliest organizations established to just study dogs. Their behavior, their cognition levels on a scientific level, and understanding how they play a role in human society.

They're still active today. They're one of the world's longest running research initiatives focused on dog behavior.

 And now today as of 2025, there are canine research facilities all around the world. They are in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Italy, Australia. In the US alone, there are facilities at Duke. Tufts and Yale University.

So I'm going to quote Jeffrey Kluger in the article what the world looks like to a dog in this time. Special Edition magazine that I was telling you about, and it says, " as with all animals, one of the most important determinants of brain power is size, specifically the size of the brain relative to the size of the body.

By this measure, the human brain is huge. About 1:50, the mass of the average human body. Compared with humans, horses are at 1:600. Lions are at 1:550. And dogs are actually 1:125. Now, if you forgot, humans are at 1:50, so dogs are at 1:125.

It's a 75 degree difference. I don't know. I don't know what you say there. There's a 75 delta. That's the gap there. 

But at the same time, it's important to note that the brain size alone doesn't necessarily determine intelligence. Other factors, such as brain structure and the density of neurons in specific regions also play a significant role. 

The next thing I wanna share is about dog's sense of smell, and I know this is very mainstream, we're all very aware that dogs have an enhanced sense of smell compared to humans, but are we all aware just how enhanced that smell really is on just like a natural organic, gene level, scientific body level that they have. So just listen to these numbers. 

Dogs see the world through their superhuman sense of smell, also known as olfactory. 

The olfactory cortex is the part of the dog's brain that's dedicated to processing smells.

Okay? It is 40 times larger 40 times, than that of a human.

Dogs have 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose, and humans have about 6 million. What's the, what's the math on that? Like 294 million difference degrees? I don't know.

This allows them to detect sense at concentrations as low as one part per trillion.

And in comparison to humans, we are able to detect sense at one part per million or billion. I assume that's some humans have a better sense of smell than others, but like what does that mean? 

Out of 1 trillion drops of water, a dog could detect a scent out of one single drop, and they could tell you which drop out of that 1 trillion drops of water where the scent came from.

I mean, it's that good. So in real life iRL. That is why dogs are so good at search and rescue operations, detecting explosives, identifying diseases like cancer or diabetes by being able to detect if there's low blood sugar or chemical marker from a tumor. They're also able to detect sense over long distances, long periods of time.

And that's because they have a really high sense of memory within their olfactory cortex. And we all know this, they can detect emotional state, but did you also know that they can detect diet? And gender. And health status, we just talked about this a little bit when it comes to say low blood sugar or say a tumor or something like that.

But even dogs that aren't trained, and I wanna get into this a little bit, even dogs that aren't trained naturally sense this, for example, this just happened to my dog Blue. And I. 

We were over here meeting one of the neighbors at our new studio apartment. Right? And when I say meeting the neighbors, I mean my two and a half year old chocolate lab that's 85 pounds and thinks he's about 10 pounds, goes running as fast as he can over to the neighbor's house and me chasing after him because I am terrible and I have not got him as trained as I'd like him to be. 

However that said. This dog who normally is wanting to jump all over everyone, just because he wants to be loved on, he's just a, a big bowl of love.

He has absolutely no violence or like aggressiveness in him whatsoever. But he wants to jump all over you because again, like I said, he thinks he's 10 pounds and this neighbor was an elderly lady, and I didn't notice it until I got really close to her, but she was very clearly feeble in the sense that she moved very slowly.

She had a very weak demeanor when you came up to her, and I didn't notice that from far away, but. When I got up there, I noticed Blue was really low to the ground like it was a small dog or a baby. And that's how he acts when he wants to show that he's not being dominant and when he doesn't wanna act like he's in being intimidating. 

And so we've seen him do that with little children. We've seen him do that with other small dogs when he wants. To get on their ground, like get lower to their level, he gets down to the ground. And that's what he was doing with her. And all I could come up with was he recognized that she was feeble and she was a little weaker.

And you know, if he jumped on her, he might knock her over. I didn't train him to do that, I promise you. Believe me, he was jumping all over everybody. I yell at him all the time. So that was very much his instinct. And I, I just have to say like, these are things that we should recognize and we shouldn't just take for granted. 

These are things we should be enhancing in our dogs. And this is why I'm here. I'm trying to expose the fact that this is not just something we think, we see something that only happens in our dogs, and if they happen to be trained just a certain way.

This is scientific, there's scientific proof and around the world there are research labs and scientists being paid to study the canine brain and to help us uncover just how alike we are and how much we could actually be helping each other. 

Okay guys, so some of the scientific research we've been talking about actually has uncovered that three genes on chromosome six contribute to dog's social behavior. And the reason this is important is that it's the same location as the human gene related to social behavior. And that gene is the oxytocin receptor gene .

The oxytocin receptor gene is often called the bonding hormone, which plays a significant role in social interactions and emotional connections. 

 Something I learned that is not just something that happens with my dog and me is that the average dog actually spends a lot of time gazing at its owner and vice versa. 

So a key player in all of this is the eyes. that's apparently something that's very scientific because when humans and dogs gaze at each other. There's some sort of chemistry that's being passed between the two. And I say that because again, from this magazine article, "urine samples were collected from 21 pairs of dogs and owners before and after experimental sessions in which the owners petted the dogs, talked to them, and often simply gazed at them. The oxytocin levels of both the dogs and the humans were higher. At the end of the sessions, and they were the highest in the pairs in which the most gazing took place. "

I mean, it was only 21 pairs of dogs and owners, but at the same time, we don't have the ability to fake oxytocin levels, you know what I mean?

And dogs definitely don't have the ability to fake oxytocin levels. So to me that's, a little bit of a hard truth right there. Because that's really hard to fake. 

since this study was released further research has suggested that different breeds of dogs might express varying levels of hyper sociability, which I'm sure you already know who I'm thinking of, it's like our golden retrievers and our labs. Just a little bit more social. They're a little bit more friendly, and what they're saying is they show specific patterns of oxytocin receptor expression, which is an enhanced version of the oxytocin gene.

Right? I'm not a scientist, but what I'm saying is there's some real science behind our human and canine emotional connection. 

And lastly on this gene related conversation, a 2021 study on the genetics of dog behavior found there are multiple loci or genetic locations linked to sociability and attachment behaviors.

And one example that I just thought was fantastic that came from this magazine was that when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 so many people refused to evacuate without their dogs that Congress passed a law requiring disaster preparedness plans to make accommodations for pets. I did not know that. 

Did you know that? How many people actually knew that? Go New Orleans. Go. Hurricane Katrina survivors. Thank you for standing up for your pets. Oh my God. 

Thank you for listening to The Human Canine Alliance. Again, I'm gonna put a shout out for rescue organizations and foster families of canines.

If you have a dog or dogs that have been really hard to adopt and they've been sitting for just too long, please reach out. I would love to put together a commercial and some social media content and put it out on our feeds and on this podcast and just to try to help spread awareness for you.

Every little bit counts and every hand helps, so if I can help, let me know. 

Again, I am Stacie. I will return in the near future. In the meantime, please click follow on whichever podcast platform you are listening on so you can get notified about future episodes as they come out. Also, please follow us on Facebook and Instagram. We are The Human Canine Alliance.

I hope you continue to listen.