The crucial aspect of an animal’s experience that causes these positive changes in its brain is exposure to a wide variety of interesting places and things.

Classical conditioning of emotions provides one example of evidence suggesting that reward-based training procedures should work better and establish a stronger bond between dog and trainer than punishment-based systems can.

While some tail wags are associated with happiness, others can signal a variety of quite different things, including fear and insecurity, social challenge, or even the warning that if you continue your approach you’re apt to be bitten.

the bottom ten dog breeds (moving downward) are: • Basset Hound • Mastiff • Beagle • Pekingese • Bloodhound • Borzoi • Chow Chow • Bulldog • Basenji • Afghan Hound

Nonetheless, in the wild more than 80 percent of a canine’s diet will be meat. For this reason, in addition to having sensors for sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, dogs have some specific taste receptors that are tuned for meats, fats, and meat-related chemicals.

Cats, whose entire sustenance may depend on small rodents, can hear sounds that are 5,000–10,000 Hz higher than the highest sounds that dogs hear.

The real difference between good and great trainers is how precisely they time that learned reward. Good trainers must also be good observers; otherwise they might miss behaviors that should have been rewarded.

Dogs also have a special sniffing ability that is quite different from their normal breathing. When your dog pushes its nose in the direction of a scent, he actively interrupts the normal breathing process so that the material he has sniffed passes over a bony shelflike structure in the nasal cavity that is designed to trap the odor-containing air

This chemical is found in many fruits and also tomatoes.