#my presence on its own is radicalizing. so since i’m apparently the family member she still wants to talk to

[creepingsharia]

Muslims team with antifa to obliterate critics of 'religion of peace'

There are new indications that forces on the left are building coalitions with Muslim Brotherhood fronts and fanning out across the U.S. in search of meetings, conferences, even informal church gatherings where Islam might be discussed in a negative light.

When they find them, they pounce.

The latest attempt to shut down a meeting in which a speaker was planning to provide information critical of Islam occurred in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Ron Branstner, a researcher based out of St. Cloud, Minnesota, had booked space at the Sioux Falls History Club for Oct. 26. This is a club that has a 100-year history of discussing world events from the perspective of free and open debate.

But while driving to the event Thursday night, Branstner received phone a call from the venue and was told not to come. A powerful Democratic politician with connections to the history club had been contacted by a Muslim lawyer named Taneeza Islam.

Apparently, that's all it takes in Sioux Falls to shut down the First Amendment, said Branstner, whose presentation was focused, ironically, on Islam and the First Amendment.

"I was going there to speak about the First Amendment, our first right to free speech, and how it is being stolen from us," Branstner said. "We ended up having to change the venue to another town 27 miles away and so everyone had to drive 27 miles to hear my presentation."

Taneeza Islam

The female Muslim attorney, Taneeza Islam, has connections to radical Islamist Linda Sarsour and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. She is involved with the Islamic Center of Sioux Falls, the same mosque that protested former Muslim Shahram Hadian's speaking event earlier this year in the city.

Taneeza Islam is a Bush Foundation fellow and civil-rights activist who also works as an immigration attorney, representing Muslim refugees and illegal aliens from Central America. She also pushes the idea that anyone who objects to unlimited refugee resettlement and illegal immigration in America is a "white nationalist."

Islam promotes the #CounterACThate meme on Facebook which tries to shut down and destroy ACT For America chapters holding meetings to educate people about Shariah law.

"She's connected to that mosque in Sioux Falls, and very politically active," Hadian said.

And that mosque, the Islamic Center of Sioux Falls, is owned lock, stock and barrel by the North American Islamic Trust or NAIT, which has been linked to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood.

Pastor Shahram Hadian grew up Muslim in Iran and later converted to Christianity, after his family defected to Canada and eventually the United States.

"She was there at a protest outside the hotel where I spoke in April, she was with the imam doing the prayers, they had all the interfaith people standing around them with their backs to the Muslims and their faces turned out while the Muslims were doing their prayers, that's a great picture of how foolish these people are," Hadian said of the April event.

So let's take a look at a few of the other recent cases that would indicate First Amendment rights no longer apply to Americans speaking out critically about one religion and one religion only – Islam [remember, criticism of Christianity is perfectly acceptable and not considered the least bit "bigoted" or "Christophobic."

****

On Thursday, Oct. 26, in Sioux Falls, author/scholar Steve Kirby, who has written five books on Islam and has a doctorate's degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, had his speaking event at a community room inside the Pizza Ranch canceled when the restaurant chain caved to protesters demands and said it didn't want to risk any incidents that might put the safety of its patrons at risk.

Kirby had to move his event at the last minute to the public library, where he was met by protesters from members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, and an allied group called Indivisible, which has been financed by George Soros and has ties to former President Barack Obama's Organizing for Action.

Protesters sat in the front rows and held up newspapers to block people's view of Kirby's presentation.

Indivisible has a presence in practically every state with the sole mission of sowing seeds of discord among Republicans and disrupting the flow of free speech wherever the issue of immigration or Islam pops up.

Their stock and trade is in vicious, Saul Alinsky-type ad-hominem attacks, with some of their favorite names for those holding opposing political views being "bigot," "xenophobe," "Islamophobe" and "racist." But the latest smear-of-choice, popularized by the Charlottesville, Virginia, incident this summer, is "white nationalist."

Since the election of Donald Trump a full convergence is playing out between radical leftists with ties to Indivisible/Antifa and those with Islamist connections such as CAIR, ISNA and the Muslim Student Association.

Anyone who questions whether open borders and "welcoming" Islamic Shariah law into your community is a good thing, gets branded a white nationalist, racist bigot. The town "bigots" are typically announced through social media posts, an article in the local newspaper and even some TV spots. Even if local media allows the accused bigot a chance to defend himself, as the Des Moines Register did for Steve Kirby, the accused comes across as having to defend himself and sounds guilty to the uninformed masses.

Jacob Hall of Sioux Center, a board member of Sioux County Conservatives, strongly rejects the argument that anyone disagreeing with the hardcore left must be a bigoted white nationalist.

"This is just another example of the unhinged left trying to suppress free speech. They don’t want a dialogue," Hall told the Des Moines Register. "They don’t want the other side to be pointed out," and they don't want a scholar who has written books about Islam to discuss the topic, he added.

The Pizza Ranch is a frequent host of Republican and conservative speaking events in the Sioux Falls area, but apparently it only takes a few calls to the restaurant management from leftist protesters to get an event canceled.

Since the protests only seem to roll in when conservatives take up the issue of Islam, the message is clear, says Dr. Mark Christian, a former Muslim turned Christian whose Omaha-Nebraska-based Global Faith Institute specializes in educating Christians about the differences between the two faiths.

"The ownership of the Pizza Ranch has now let it be known that if you speak there, you'd better not talk negatively about Islam," said Dr. Christian.

***

On Sept. 12, former FBI counter-terrorism agent John Guandolo and journalist Chris Gaubatz spoke at the city-owned community center in tiny Oakland, Iowa, near Council Bluffs in Pottawattamie County. There topic was "Understanding the Threat: The Muslim Brotherhood's Secret Strategies for the USA."

Not only did the event get protested and disrupted, again with newspapers held up in the front rows and loud talking, but police had to be called in to restore order.

Weeks after the event the local GOP chairman for Pottawattamie County, Jeff Jorgensen, was removed from office by the GOP when it was discovered he played a role in inviting Guandolo and Gaubatz to the area to speak about Islam.

***

On Oct. 18, the Sportsman's Club in Stewartsville, Minnesota, canceled an event where Usama Dakdok, an Egyptian Coptic Christian who travels around speaking about how Christians are treated by Muslims in Muslim-majority countries such as his native Egypt.

The Sportsman's Club, which is rented out for various community events including those hosted by Muslims, has an eight-person board of directors that voted 6-2 to cancel the contract for Dakdok's speaking event. The board took this action only after protesters began phoning the club and demanding it not rent space to Dakdok, even though a contract to book the venue had already been signed, according to the Post Bulletin of Stewartsville, which is near Rochester, Minnesota.

One of the Sportsman's Club's board members said he was reluctant to cancel the contract because he was "kinda on the side of free speech."

"And I'm not biased against Muslims whatsoever. I don't have a problem with them. It's just the ISIS parts that I have an issue with," Bunde told the Post Bulletin, referring to the Islamic State.

Regina Mustafa, a 37-year-old native of Philadelphia, announced a run for Congress in Minnesota, where she has lived for the last 12 years and been an activist for interfaith dialogue between Islam, Judaism and Christianity. She recently pulled out of the race.

Regina Mustafa, a Muslim convert and CAIR operative, was one of the ringleaders who helped pressure the Sportsman's Club to cancel Dakdok's event. She said she supported the club's decision, but didn't discount the possibility that Dakdok might secure another venue around Rochester. So, just to be sure, she said she would forge ahead with plans to hold a counter-event at the Rochester library, which is set for Oct. 29 from 2:30 p.m. to 4 p.m., the same day Dakdok was set to speak.

"I'd like to still have this event," said Mustafa, who teaches that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. "There's a great amount of interest in it already."

***

In April 2017, a heavily armed Muslim Ehab Jabber infiltrated a Christian conference at a local hotel in Sioux Falls. He entered the ticketed event undetected with a handgun and was told to leave, then livestreamed threats to the Christians from his vehicle in the parking lot, where he had a cache of weapons including an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Jaber has since pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges but the state charges remain unresolved. "I have a feeling they're going to drop those charges. Lost his guns and right bear, is now a felon, but the other [local] prosecutor said the guy did nothing wrong."

***

Hadian embarked on a four-city tour through Minnesota and Wisconsin in August-September. He was protested at three of the events and at the fourth, the host received calls pressuring him to cancel the event.

At one of the events in Browerville, Minnesota, on Sept. 12, a couple of the protesters got inside and came up and stood in front of Hadian and disrupted the meeting.

"The sheriff was there and one of the two was literally dragged out, and of course he was claiming he was assaulted, but there were too many witnesses to see he would not leave and was disrupting the event, and when the security put hands on him he went limp," Hadian said.

The next night in Freeport, Minnesota, there were no protesters but the owner of the facility said Muslim activists and their supporters were calling him at home trying to pressure him to cancel the event, saying they were going to boycott his business. He held firm and did not cancel.

***

Two nights later, on Sept. 14 a group of communists allied with liberal Christians and radical Muslims decided they would take their protest directly to the enemy. This time they would actually protest a group of Christians meeting in the privacy of their own church -- the Granite City Baptist Church in St. Cloud, where Hadian was scheduled as a guest speaker on the topic of "The Trojan Horse of Interfaith Dialogue."

Hadian believes the interfaith movement is geared toward getting Christians to accept the general claims of Islam and ultimately deny the deity of Christ. He was greeted by about 50 protesters, roughly half of them from the interfaith community called UniteCloud, which includes an amalgamation of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Several infiltrated the meeting inside the church.

Hadian said he saw at least two people wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts and others appeared to be members of local communist and/or antifa-affiliated groups called Expect Resistance and the IWW General Defense Committee Local 17.

These groups had been agitating on Facebook in the days leading up to the meeting. They also put flyers around town calling Hadian, who is a native of Iran with brown skin, a "white supremacist."

That was the first time where we saw that element, a communist group, along with BLM and an interfaith group called UniteCloud, which includes people who say they are Christians," Hadian said.

"And one of their Facebook posts called me a white supremacist, that we were recruiting white people to go kill Muslims," said Hadian, a former police officer turned Christian pastor whose ministry is called the "Truth in Love Project.

"We hired police officers, we did bag searches for everyone coming into the church," he said.

Prior to Hadian's event, the Granite City Baptist Church had been vandalized after hosting another former-Muslim speaker from Pakistan.

"They said on their Facebook posts they were going to disrupt the event during Q & A period. At what point does that become defamation to say I am inciting people to go kill and hurt Muslims?"

Hadian advises others who want to hold meetings or events on Islam to avoid city-owned public properties, such as libraries, schools or community centers, and if that is the only available space then make it a ticketed, private event.

"One, they can cancel you last minute, pull the plug, and number-two it's public space. Even if you have to charge five bucks for a ticket, it's worth it, or better yet get a church because now it's private property and it just looks better. A church service you add the element of infringing upon an entire group's First Amendment rights, so it looks really bad for the protesters to be protesting a church's private gathering."

***

The last leg of Hadian's three-city tour was in Milwaukee on Sept. 16. Again, protesters converged on his event.

"About 15 people gathered outside, and they came in to disrupt and also got escorted out by sheriff's deputies," Hadian said. "So on that trip I got protested three out of four trips, and the other venue tried to cancel, so this is now the new norm.

"The whole modus operandi is to shut down the event, make it expensive because you have to hire security, anything to stop this information from getting out to Christians who need to hear it."

The travesty is that the anti-free speech leftists and Muslims conduct their operations against the First Amendment under this faux argument that they want to promote dialogue.

"And yet they don't even want us to engage in dialogue, they just want to shut us down, so it's a one-way tolerance, and apostasy on the part of the Christians who are involved in this," Hadian said.

Engaging in a true dialogue is one thing, but Christians who claim to be "uniting" with Muslims around a religion that denies the deity of Christ, denies the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ, are doing nothing if not rallying to the support of a global anti-Christ religious system, he said.

Antifa, an amalgamation of Marxist and anarchist groups, is planning a series of nationwide rallies Nov. 4 that it hopes will bring down the Trump-Pence administration. Sign up for WND's free in-depth report on the inner workings of this dangerous organization.

[garbagebabygirl]

Under the cut: reflections on andrea zuckerman, wealth inequality, and being lower middle class at liberal arts college. 

Call it Marxist-idealism, but here's to hoping that the next 90210 reboot is radically different not only for Andrea, but for all of us.

Beverly Hills, 90210's Andrea Zuckerman, the plucky, headstrong editor-in-chief of the West Beverly Blaze, represents a unique socioeconomic demographic in need of further reflection. She is the archetypal "poor kid," the girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks. Though she lives out of district, she is able to use her grandmother's address to attend the lucrative West Beverly Hills High and access the same educational spoils as some of the wealthiest youths in the country. Andrea finds her niche in the school paper as well as with her group of friends (the show's main characters: Brenda, Brandon, Kelly, Dylan, Steve, Donna, and David). Her main narrative on the show is that she is less wealthy than her peers, facing unique challenges, like the long bus ride she takes to school, in order to maintain the appearance of West Beverly wealth. Andrea's positionality both as a character and as a person in society are representative of cultural conceptions of wealth, even today. Her interactions with other characters portray wealth inequality as individual rather than systemic. Her position as an "outsider with access to the inside" in a closed community is also comparable to the position of lower middle class students at expensive liberal arts colleges, a relationship to be explored later.

           A common portrayal of Andrea's socioeconomic status on the show is that it's a trait that she has, rather than a system she is subjected to. This tendency towards archetypes is, of course, not uncommon for Young Adult melodramas. All of the Classic archetypes are present still in 90210: the troubled bad boy (Dylan), the shallow popular girl (Kelly), the hard-working All-American (Brandon). However, making wealth a personal attribute in the same that being a musician (David) is a personal attribute is problematic. One step further, on 90210 each character has both their personality traits and their cross-to-bear traits, and each character has an "equal" mix of each. For instance, Kelly is beautiful and popular, but her mom is addicted to cocaine. Andrea is really smart, but she's poor. In this way, the struggles of each character are depicted as comparable: it's rough all over. Everybody has their cross to bear. In fact a common event on the show is the down-to-earth Walsh family (we'll unpack them later) reflecting on these "equitable inequalities." They say things like: "sure, Dylan may have money but he has no relationship with his father. And I wouldn't trade our family for anything in the world." Framing wealth this way is risky. Portraying wealth inequality as a personal cross-to-bear fails to account for its systematic roots. There is no room for conversation on the wealth inequality in Beverly Hills (not to MENTION the intersection of wealth inequality and racial inequality in the region, a topic well-covered by 90210 critics). Andrea's personal cross to bear of being poor is solely her own. Her wealthy friends are therefore not accountable in the same way that they are not accountable for Donna's dyslexia. It's rough all over, right? Nothing we can do about it. In this way, the more affluent members of the group never need to reflect on their own socioeconomic statuses: Andrea is the only one. And so once again she is the outsider.

           Although Andrea is internally the Other, on the surface she is an insider. She goes to the same elite school as her friends, hangs out at the Peach Pit with all of her friends, goes to the same parties as her friends. She's financially struggling but her friends don't see her that way, since she appears to have access to the same spoils as they do. What they don't realize is the tremendous amount of physical and emotional labor that go into maintaining this appearance of wealth. She mentions in an episode that she must wake up at five a.m. in order to get to school on time via city bus. She throws herself into the Blaze, into volunteering and planning dances in order to earn her Yale scholarship. To her wealthy friends, there is this threshold of wealth that, once crossed, entitles one to the full advantages of the upper class. To Andrea, this threshold is West Beverly: it's assumed that once she's enrolled in the school she has all of the same privileges as her peers. Her friends are frequently surprised when she's unable to accompany them on their trips to Rodeo Drive. "You're one of us, right? Then why can't you do xyz with us?" Her peers fail to recognize the nuance within their situations, imposing additional expectations onto Andrea. She is the outsider on the inside, and even though her friends know she's "poor," they fail/are unwilling to recognize what this actually means. Chalk it up to rich-kid-cluelessness, to the nature of wealth inequality, to selfishness or liberal guilt. Either way, the result is the same: increased pressure and emotional burden for Andrea.

           Part of maintaining this identity includes not burdening her wealthy friends with her financial problems for fear of being cast out. However, I would argue that Andrea doesn't want to assimilate completely, so she establishes her difference from her peers through her activism and her un-California dressing style. It may be more comfortable to differentiate herself in this way, by her own choice, rather than by her uncontrollable socioeconomic status. When she does occasionally express frustration/worry about wealth inequality, such as when the school board became suspicious of her residency, her friends are clueless at best and patronizing at worst. One would think that Steve or Dylan, the group's wealthiest members, would be the most out of touch with her situation, but I would argue that in reality it's Brandon. Brandon Walsh, hard-working All-American fellow journalist, is one of Andrea's closest friends/near-love interest. A common 90210 narrative is that the Walsh family isn't As-Wealthy-As their West Beverly peers... but with their corporate accountant father and driveway full of cars, they're doing more than okay. However, Brandon and Brenda love to tout how much they struggle to financially fit in when the reality is that they are able to keep up just fine. They struggle financially until it gets inconvenient, at which point their father steps in and bails them out. They have the privilege of a struggle that builds character with no real consequences, whereas Andrea's struggle is her unchanging reality. Brandon in particular often mistakes his possessions and success to be the direct result of his hard work. He often is self-righteous in discussing his own wealth, making statements like "I'm broke too and you don't see me complaining. I work for a living." This pseudo-working-class approach is very ingrained into Brandon and, because of their relationship, also ingrained into Andrea. I would argue that Brandon's personal narrative is more detrimental to Andrea than someone like Dylan, who makes no attempt to downplay his personal wealth. As we reflect on Andrea's positionality compared to that of the lower middle class students of expensive liberal arts colleges, the burden of the Brandon Walsh Mindset  will become more apparent.

           Before we do so, it's important to distinguish that Andrea is not living below the poverty line. She's not on welfare; she never goes hungry. This isn't an argument that the challenges of Andrea/lower middle class individuals are As-Bad-As those living in poverty. Instead, this argument calls to recognize the unique challenges and emotional burdens experienced by Andrea/lower middle class individuals when they have prolonged access to wealthy spaces. When they are expected to maintain the appearance of a higher socioeconomic status in order to retain access to resources. When they are the outsider on the inside. In this way, Andrea's positionality at West Beverly is comparable to the positionality of lower middle class students at expensive liberal arts colleges. Both West Beverly and these liberal arts colleges are closed communities of education and social events dominated by wealthy individuals. Lower middle class students in these spaces internalize similar expectations to maintain the appearance of wealth. Enrollment in these colleges is the same "threshold" as enrollment in West Beverly: once they're in, they're expected to have access to the entire array of lifestyle spoils as their more affluent peers. Their peers cannot understand why they "refuse" to opt for the same amenities that they do, failing to recognize that they are literally unable to. "Why won't you go to dinner with us? Why won't you fill your car with gas? Why aren't you willing to raise your rent budget so you can live with us? We can!" Additionally, in these spaces there's an overwhelming presence of the cross-to-bear narrative (except in this case, I would argue that liberal guilt plays more of a role than it does in the universe of 90210). Wealthy peers are uncomfortable recognizing wealth inequality within their own community (despite the fact that this is the focus of many of their studies), so they downplay its significance and compare their own struggles. "I don't understand that your parents can't pay their mortgage, but my parents are divorced so I know how you feel." Again, this is not to garner sympathy for the lower middle class (who have their own privileges in comparison to impoverished communities) or downplay the personal/family problems of affluent students. But it's crucial to distinguish how the characterization of wealth inequality as a personal attribute comparable to a personal challenge and NOT as a systematic problem is harmful to both individuals in these spaces and larger conceptualizations of wealth inequality.

           A unique aspect of the liberal arts environment is the disproportionate presence of the Brandon Walsh Mindset. Whereas Andrea only knows one Brandon Walsh, I would argue that liberal arts colleges are filled with literally hundreds of Brandon Walshes-- students that tout the "struggling college student" identity until it's inconvenient, at which point they phone in cash from their parents. Because of the 'threshold' nature of these communities, it is assumed that the lower middle class students have this same luxury. When these students express discontent with their socioeconomic status, they are patronized with "I know, I'm broke too." Knowing that this statement has different implications, the student, once again, is confronted with their own difference. The outsider on this inside.

           So what is the solution for the Andreas of the world? Should they stay out of these spaces, sticking to their own socioeconomic circles for social comfort? Should they not try for a West Beverly education, even though their grandmother lives in-district? Should they not study in liberal arts colleges, even though they received scholarships that make it possible? I guess the first step is reflection, changing narratives, changing dialogue. We need to become less uncomfortable discussing wealthy inequality--especially within groups where everyone is perceived to be of the same socioeconomic status, Those who are more affluent should reflect on their wealth so the burden of need not fall entirely on the outsiders. And, ultimately, these discussions need to be expanded outside the borders of their elite, closed communities. The Andreas of the world are not the greatest victims of wealth inequality: they are only a microcosm within one institution. Change needs to come with larger, sweeping changes for the more extreme ends of the wealth equality spectrum. Call it Marxist-idealism, but here's to hoping that the next 90210 reboot is radically different not only for Andrea, but for all of us. And maybe some non-white main characters.

[biofunmy]

Dogs Can’t Help Falling in Love

TEMPE, Ariz. — Xephos is not the author of “Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You,” one of the latest books to plumb the nature of dogs, but she helped inspire it. And as I scratched behind her ears, it was easy to see why.

First, she fixed on me with imploring doggy eyes, asking for my attention. Then, every time I stopped scratching she nudged her nose under my hand and flipped it up. I speak a little dog, but the message would have been clear even if I didn’t: Don’t stop.

We were in the home office of Clive Wynne, a psychologist at Arizona State University who specializes in dog behavior. He belongs to Xephos, a mixed breed that the Wynne family found in a shelter in 2012.

Dr. Wynne’s book is an extended argument about what makes dogs special — not how smart they are, but how friendly they are. Xephos’ shameless and undiscriminating affection affected both his heart and his thinking.

As Xephos nose-nudged me again, Dr. Wynne was describing genetic changes that occurred at some point in dog evolution that he says explain why dogs are so sociable with members of other species.

“Hey,” Dr. Wynne said to her as she tilted her head to get the maximum payoff from my efforts, “how long have you had these genes?”

No one disputes the sociability of dogs. But Dr. Wynne doesn’t agree with the scientific point of view that dogs have a unique ability to understand and communicate with humans. He thinks they have a unique capacity for interspecies love, a word that he has decided to use, throwing aside decades of immersion in scientific jargon.

“Dog Is Love” is one of several new books on dogs out this year, and one of a flood of such books over the last decade or so. Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist and researcher of dog behavior at Duke University, who founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center, recently wrote that there are 70,000 dog books listed on Amazon.

Since 2000, around the time dog research had a resurgence, a small but significant number of those books are written by scientists for a general audience. Like Dr. Hare’s “The Genius of Dogs,” published in 2013, the books address what is going on in a dog’s heart and mind. Most emphasize the mind.

Dr. Wynne’s book runs counter to Dr. Hare’s when it comes to the importance of dog’s thinking ability, which Dr. Hare sees as central to their bond with humans. By using the L word, Dr. Wynne may well appeal to the many besotted dog owners. But he may also disappoint. The reason dogs are such “an amazing success story” is because of their ability to bond with other species, he said. Not just humans.

Raise a dog with sheep and it will love sheep. Raise a dog with goats and it will love goats. Raise a dog with people … you know the rest.

Some now extinct wolves attached themselves to humans 15,000 years ago or longer because we had good leftovers, or so the dominant theory goes, although what actually happened is lost to time. Apparently, humans liked the renegade wolves quite a bit and eventually started controlling their breeding and letting them sleep on down coverlets.

Now, as Dr. Wynne said in a talk at the International Canine Science conference in Phoenix in October, dogs are an astonishing evolutionary success. Wolves, not so much. “For every one surviving wolf on this planet, there are at least 3,000 dogs.” On the other hand, nobody puts a silly Halloween costume on a wolf.

In the early 2000s, when Dr. Wynne began research on dogs, one of his experiments was a follow-up on the work of Dr. Hare who had concluded that dogs were better than wolves or other animals at following human directions. In particular, dogs followed human pointing better than other animals. Dr. Wynne and Monique Udell, an animal behaviorist at Oregon State University, expected to confirm Dr. Hare’s findings.

The wolves they chose to work with were hand-raised and socialized at Wolf Park, in Lafayette, Ind. Dr. Wynne said he found the wolves were as good at following human pointing as the best pet dogs.

Dr. Hare and his colleagues responded by questioning whether the experiments were really comparable, maintaining that dogs have an innate ability to follow human pointing without the special attention the wolves were given. The debate continues.

The second part of Dr. Wynne’s argument has to do with how social dogs are. There is no question that they bond with people in a way that other canines do not. Dr. Wynne recounted an experiment showing that as long as puppies spend 90 minutes a day, for one week, with a human any time before they are 14 weeks old, they will become socialized and comfortable with humans.

Interestingly, the experiment found no genetic absolutism about the connection between dogs and humans. Without contact with humans when they are young, dogs can become as wary of humans as wild animals. Wolves are not so easily socialized. They require 24-hour-a-day involvement with humans for many weeks when they are puppies to become more tolerant of human beings. They never turn into Xephos.

Admittedly, Xephos is at the tail-wagging, face-licking, cozy-cuddling end of dog friendliness. Anyone who knows dogs can call to mind some that are not friendly at all, or are friendly to only one person. But in general there is no comparison in friendliness between dogs and wolves.

“O.K., she’s not every dog, but she’s not radically atypical,” Dr. Wynne said of Xephos as she snuggled up to me. “Are you sweetie — you’re not completely untypical of your kind?”

The evidence of dog affection for humans goes beyond the observable actions of Xephos and those like her. Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University, who himself was drawn into animal study by wanting to understand what his own dog, Callie, was thinking, used magnetic resonance imaging machines to watch what was going on in their brains.

Among his findings is that the part of dogs’ brains that light up when they hear their owners’ voices is the same part of the human brain that lights up when we are fond of someone or something. His first book was “How Dogs Love Us.”

By looking at the lemon-sized dog brain, he has shown, for instance, that, based on how the reward center lights up, a dog likes praise as much as it likes hot dogs. In testing outside of the M.R.I., Dr. Berns has also found that, given a choice, some dogs prefer their owners to food.

He agreed that the hypersociality of dogs is what makes them special rather than particular cognitive abilities. “It’s hard to demonstrate any cognitive task that dogs are superior in,” he said. But he pointed out that “ultimately the difficulty is in saying what is a cognitive function and an emotional function.”

Alexandra Horowitz, head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, and a prolific writer on dogs, also addressed the question of love briefly in her new book, “Our Dogs, Ourselves.”

Without doubt, dogs have feelings, she wrote, but she cautioned that just as certainly, those feelings were not the same as human feelings. Nor, she argued, should we assume that dogs are in between robot and homo sapiens on an emotional spectrum. She wrote in her book, “For all we know, dogs’ emotional experience is far more elaborate than ours.”

Central to that experience, although unknown in its complexity, is the pleasure a dog experiences in the presence of humans. The intensity of that pleasure and the ease of triggering it, Dr. Wynne said, is built into the dog genome.

He found this in his research with Bridgett vonHoldt, a molecular biologist at Princeton University. She and a team of researchers identified genes in dogs that in humans are associated with Williams-Beuren syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. One of the many symptoms of the syndrome is indiscriminate friendliness. Dr. Wynne and Ms. Udell worked with Dr. vonHoldt on a subsequent study of wolves and dogs that tied behavior and genetics together. They concluded that the genes associated with Williams-Bueren syndrome in humans underlie the friendless of dogs compared to wolves.

Humans, they suggested, may have selected friendly dogs over thousands of years of domestication and the Williams-Beuren genes may be one of the results. Other scientists have been cautious about the results, seeing the work as presenting an intriguing hypothesis that requires more research.

Whether these are the genes involved, humans appear to have molded dogs to be friendly to other species beyond humans. Apparently, puppies introduced to any other species when they are young enough, form a strong bond with that species.

This hasn’t been tested with all species, of course. But consider the sheep and goats. Ray Coppinger of Hampshire College, who died in 2017, had documented that puppies of certain breeds kept with sheep bond to the sheep. They stay with the flock and guard it. The same thing happens when puppies are kept with goats and other less likely creatures, like penguins.

Dogs have “an abnormal willingness to form strong emotional bonds with almost anything that crosses their path,” Dr. Wynne said. “And they maintain this throughout life. Above and beyond that they have a willingness and an interest to interact with strangers.”

How and when this free love, or hypersociality evolved in dogs is up for debate. Dr. Wynne is betting that after some ancient wolves began to associate with humans 15,000 or more years ago and became dogs, and humans began to live in settlements and farming took off about 8,000 years ago, humans began to breed dogs for friendliness, causing the genetic differences that Dr. vonHoldt found. With luck, future research on modern and ancient dog DNA will show if he is right.

For now, we humans can at least enjoy the amiability of dogs. Looking at Xephos as we wrapped up our conversation, he said, “It’s not strange that she wants to interact with me. What’s strange is that she wants to be friends with you. Right?”

Well, I don’t know about that. I’m a pretty good ear scratcher. “Right, Xephos?”

Sahred From Source link Science

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