RawPetMedics Tuesday Live: Emotions, Love and Kisses?

Oh yeah, man, you have to, you have to cut it, man. You only have 15 seconds. If you do more than 15 seconds Facebook snippet. That's what happened. We were doing a— remember we did that summit show thing before Christmas and somebody was playing Christmas carols and it was just some guy who was making a really big effort to do a great presentation and we just got turned off all our platforms. It was like, what happened? They chopped us off. And later they tell you, well, you were playing a song, you don't have permission to play it. So you're only there to play 15 seconds of it. I forgot to tell you that actually. I should have thought of that before you did it. Well, excellent entrance music.

Very good.

I just wanted to bring them in.

Hey guys.

So Welcome tonight. What do you think of the new logo? Have you had a look? You know, you're going to start seeing that everywhere.

Check it out. Thanks, Ellie.

That's Nick's Ellie.

Thank you, Ellie. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, all very good.

Very good.

We like it.

Very happy with that one. 3 speech bubbles. 3 amigos.

Indeed.

Like that. Very good. Bit of a microphone. Looks good, doesn't it?

It's going to be—

What about the radar? What's the radar got to do with it, lads?

Speaking loudly.

Is that one of those radio things? It's emitting sound.

Yeah, I know.

5G into your brain.

I just wanted to— yeah, that's right, 5G radar mast off the thing.

Factworms into your brain. Don't you love them?

Amazing. Well, tonight is Valentine's. I hope you've all had a very, very good Valentine's. If you got cards, great. If you didn't, doesn't matter. We love you. We are here for you to talk to you all about emotion, about the heart, We were going to talk about the nutrition, carnitine and taurine and what have you, but we then thought that that's a bit boring. So we're actually going to go for something a little bit more eclectic and perhaps a little emotional and what have you. There will be physiology, there will be biochemistry, there will be all sorts of goodness. And I think all three of us, and even philosophy, and we're all going to come at it from a slightly different perspective. So I think we should jump in straight away. I've got some, some wonderful quotes from the amazing Fred Provenza, if you want, where I can tie nutrition and, and the heart together.

If you found out who he is— oh God, here's another one.

Don't you start. Don't you start. Uh, get it on Audible. Okay, I'm just going to jump in there. Okay, I'm just going to steal the, uh, the, the initial limelight. So this is a book by Fred Provenza. It's 1,000 for— it's, you know, it's 145,000 words. He really, really packs them in. Like that. Okay, you see, so if you're into that and if you like Brendan and you're able to get your head around all of that, then this is the book for you. However, if you're like me and you want kind of a bit of a broader view and you want it between the eyes, then— or between the ears, perhaps you should say— go for the Audible because it's 70,000. His editor basically went and removed half the book, and he has actually done the audio himself, and he is the most charming man in nutrition. Seriously, he, he puts everybody to shame. He's really, really, really lovely. So if you want it on Audible, that's the way to go. And I'm just going to read you— remember, we're talking about heart, we're talking about emotion, we're talking about nutrition because we are Raw Pet Medics and we've got a new logo and everything else.

So here we go.

I'm just going to link them all together and just read you a couple of paragraphs that I got. So this is Chapter 4, More Than a Matter of Taste. To survive a rare lung disease, an American dancer named Claire Silvio underwent heart and lung transplant in 1988. Her chest was sawed open, her diseased organs removed, and in their place, doctors inserted the heart and lungs of a donor. Following surgery, she was certain that her harrowing journey was over. In reality, it had only just begun. The new organs weren't the only thing that she had inherited. During her recovery in intensive care, Claire began to feel the presence of someone else inside her. Initially frightened and then captivated, she realized that some of her attitudes and behaviors had changed. In A Change of Heart— she's written a book called A Change of Heart— Claire describes how she was shocked to discover that her food preferences— you see the link?

We like food.

Yes. Or her food preferences had changed following her organ transplant. The cells and organs from her donor had a mind of their own and were now influencing what she chose to eat. After an extraordinary dream, she began to search for the family of her donor. And then the next 5 pages are removed by the editor, and then we go to the end of that chapter, which says, when Claire Sylvia was asked while riding an exercise bike after surgery what she wanted more than anything else, she immediately, immediately replied, a beer. As she recalled, she was mortified that I had answered this sincere question with such a flippant response. She was even more astonished because she didn't even like beer. To her bewilderment, she was now fond of food she hadn't liked before, especially Snickers bars and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. She was also showing a strange new affinity for green peppers, which she had never liked. After her organ transplant, she found herself adding green peppers to every conceivable dish. Fish, although she had no idea why. When I was finally allowed to drive again, my car practically steered itself to the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken. Again, this made no sense at all because she had never eaten fast food ever before, but for some inexplicable reason, she had now cravings for chicken nuggets. Sometime later, after she made contact with the donor's family, they informed her that she had inherited the heart and lungs of their 18-year-old son who had loved all the food she now craved. And so she set up a support group for people who'd had transplants, and she found that a big long list of steak eaters who became vegetarian after they'd had a transplant, a milk drinker who began to hate milk after the transplant, a man who always wanted to like wine but never enjoyed it until his transplant, another man who never liked coffee until he received kidney from his sister, a big coffee drinker, and soon he was drinking coffee. A man who received a kidney from his wife, and he craved her favorite foods. While she still liked those foods, she liked them less after she donated her kidney. One man hated Italian food but craved spicy Italian food after his transplant. And so the list goes on. Explain that.

Very, very— I'm trying to explain it now.

Good. Isn't that good?

So interesting. So interesting.

So there you go. I thought that was a really nice tie-up of the food thing and the heart thing and how there's, there's an awful lot. I was, I was just speaking to somebody today that it just demonstrates to a certain extent we know a lot about physiology and biochemistry and all these things, but Actually, there's a lot that we don't know about, and we need to keep our minds open. Not so open that our brains fall out, but are open. The brain is like a— well, the mind is like a parachute. It only works when it's open.

Indeed.

Okay, so that's really my thought.

I love it, Nick. I've heard of that before. I've heard of people getting organ transplants and suddenly being able to pick up a musical instrument and and get to it far quicker than anybody that's never picked up the instrument could do. You know, I, I go straight to Scholar. I always like to know Google Scholar just to see what leaps off the page. And what did I type in? Like, organ transplant memories shared, I think, or something like that. I put in— the very first thing comes up has been repeated a number of times. So this study has been shared an awful lot. This is in 2020, very recently, and it says personality changes following heart transplantation. 'The Role of Cellular Memory.' And they say that there are 4 categories of personality changes so far discussed in the literature: changes in preferences, alterations in emotions and temperament, modifications of identity, and memories from the donor's life. And they say there are 4, so far 4 explanations for it: epigenetic memory, DNA memory, RNA memory, and protein memory that comes from the transplanted organ. And they say there's absolutely dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of accounts of this, and there's a whole big study on it. So instead of me reading out the whole study to you all, I'll just share that for a bit of the science behind what Nick is talking about. But that's interesting. Bloody hell.

Wow.

Who would have thought?

Yeah, you know, and the more books you read— I mean, there's loads of books that we were looking at, the Psychobiome a couple of weeks back and the, uh, Mind-Gut Connection and stuff. And you start to see the, just the amount of information that's going on out there. So there's what's within your mitochondrial RNA, there's what's within your, um, all of that fuzzy space between those genes that we know that work, that they're sort of now unraveling to realize that this is a little bit of genetic stuff as to why that collie still rounds up sheep, um, you know, several, um, uh, generations down the line, even though they've not seen a sheep in a long time. Um, you know, all the way through to what's happening within your gut as well and the gut microbiome and what's passed on. Oh, just so much going on with that. Um, that is just so intriguing.

Did you see that meme, guys? There was a meme recently that I saw of somebody's collie had gone out into the fields and herded some sheep back into the garden. Not only into the garden, into the house. Not only into the house, into the kitchen. Not only that, it wasn't even their sheep.

He just went out and started gathering sheep. He was a pup. Oh, I love that.

I think he deserves a biscuit for that.

Hey, not a biscuit, but a treat of some healthy —like in terms of this heart transplant, I started thinking, does a heart have a brain? And there is a heart-brain axis, and studies show the importance of the heart in the heart-brain system. The heart has its own intelligence, has its own neurological system and electromagnetic fields. These are actually much larger and more powerful than the brains, so there's no reason why it wouldn't be able to store a little bit of information when it's being transplanted from A to B. Oh God, this is a whole big rabbit hole that we haven't even prepared for. It's really interesting.

I wondered, because I've not really gone into the replacement heart surgery, as to how much they try and reimplant the vagus nerve into the atrioventricular nodes. Sorry, into the sinoatrial nodes. They could.

Can they? They can't do that.

Well, they do because they do it with your hands, don't they? They reattach the nerves and expect the nerve endings to repopulate the myelin sheaths. They're not going to grow new nerve cells. They just send out the new ends to the cells to repopulate those sheaths.

Oh, that's interesting.

That is interesting. I wonder whether they do reattach the vagus because that's what with the mind-gut connection, it's all about. It doesn't just travel one way from the brain down to the gut. It travels from the gut back up the vagus nerve into the brain.

And not only that, it's for every efferent from the brain to the gut, there are 9 afferents going from the gut. So it's a 1 to 9. So for every message that goes to your gut, 9 go from the gut to the brain. So who is running the show? Yeah, you have to ask, you know.

Absolutely.

Yeah, big stuff. Very, very big stuff.

Yeah, I love it. Okay, the danger is that, um, people were saying, please don't tell me my dog doesn't love me. I said, the danger is that we are clinically going to pull apart what is going on with Heart and love, as only three men could.

Before we get into— I did find an apology on. I did apologize right at the beginning, Conor. We won't let the science ruin the moment. We might, we might, but we can't try.

We are Raw Pet Medics. You'll find us on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. Deeply appreciate any support you can give us there, guys. If you can, great price of a cup of tea each month is all we ask. And if you can, great. If you can't, absolutely doesn't matter. We love you anyway. We are here for the absolute joy of it. But guys, it's Valentine's Day today, obviously. So the very first question is, okay, and I haven't prepared the guys for this, as you're going to see by the expression on their faces. But I'm not going to ask you, where'd you meet your wife? But I would like to know, what is love? Another follow-on question. What is love? What is, in your definition of, what comes to mind? What is love?

We're doing song titles here. It's a great song.

Great tune. Thanks. What is love? Who sang that? Who did sing that? What is love?

Bloody hell, I should know that.

I don't know, but what's love got to do with it?

Yeah, we need to find time, guys. Come on, give me a definition of what is love. And I have a follow-on question that you're really not going to like.

Okay, do you want a romantic answer or do you want—

Give me your Nick's answer.

What does your heart tell you? Okay, what does my heart— Okay, we kind of went into this for about a minute before we started, but I think Uh, well, ah, there's that, that whole thing about to be in love is what gets you to procreate and, you know, do, you know, do all that sort of stuff. But then to, to then— but the actual to, to love somebody is a completely different kettle of fish. Okay, so to be in love and love for me are two different things. We could go a very long way with this, and no doubt we will.

That's fair enough. That's a fair statement.

So, so for me, I think it is— it— love is a manipulation by our physiology because it makes things happen, like the next generation, without putting too fine a point on it.

Yeah.

Okay, you're right under the 9 o'clock, uh, threshold, aren't you? You really have dealt with that before.

Yeah, there's No lust in this household.

Is that what you're saying? That was a very clean answer.

That was a very— yes, that was a viva answer. You know, when you're asked— that's the kind of thing they would ask you in physiology or something, isn't it? They'd say, just ask love. Where does love come into this? It is a great question. Bren, where are you on that? You can drop yourself into the hole if you like, and then I'm going to ask you at the end.

Well, I absolutely agree. I mean, look, for us, the emotional connection is what drives on the species. It's, you know, it's going to be, you know, you meet a partner that you effectively fall in love with because there is a mutual attraction there. It's no good if it's one way because they're just going to, you know, disappear and dump you in it. Call the police. Have they done that to you before, Conor? I wondered why you started your family so late in life. Was there a time away? Has to be two-way, so they tell me.

Has to be two-way.

Has to be two-way. So, you know, no means no, I think. As I keep telling my daughters, you know, no means no. Just say no. That's what Bill Burr was saying.

He was saying in the court, they're reading it out, she goes, no, please stop. Don't. No, stop it. And he goes, yeah, when you say it like that. But actually, you at the time, she's like, no, stop. No, because that's not the way you said it at the time. Anyway, jeez. Let's try and keep it. Stop digging now. Go on with your answer.

I'm a bit flustered from all of that last.

Yeah. Do you know what? Take a deep breath, mate.

I think Nick's answer kind of sums it up there. I think there's a few different types of love. I think you can be in love. You know, and that's, you know, being really attracted to somebody and whoever that might be. And then there's like, like the, like loving someone, which can be like, you can love your mate, you can love your brother, you know, you can love the guy in the trench beside you. And so there's that act of love as well, you know. And so I think there's a few— I think they call that companionate love. And so that was interesting. So two different types of kind of love there. So there's a few different types.

And this commitment has to come into that, doesn't it? I mean, you've got that level of commitment to the other party. So it's not just you surviving anymore. It's now going to be whoever you love. So that could be your brother. It could be your friend. It could be your lover. Okay. But it is ultimately you're committed to the survival of those you love. And this is where I think that companion being a dog sort of comes into it because that love is shown as a commitment to the pair of you surviving. You know, that's why we see all of these wonderful videos of dogs protecting the kids or protecting their owners. Or, you know, I think that is where I would come from it from. But carry on.

No, that's about right, because I spent too long— somebody put it up on my page there maybe 10 years ago, and I put it up now and again just to stir the pot a bit, to be honest. But somebody said it was a meme, and somebody said, aren't dogs just furry parasites? And I was struck by that from somebody who did behavior in college for years. And I was like, I was thinking, hmm, hang on there a second. Yeah, what is this? Because all the funniest memes are like, I just got one recently there from Karen. And like this, it's a picture of like a stick man lying down in floods of tears going, I would do anything for you. I'll work 3 jobs, I'll buy you the best food and blah blah blah. And now they'll bring you to your vet visits and I care for you and I worry about when you're going to die. And the dog goes, yeah, cool, you got a treat. You know, I'm like, they're the funniest memes because they're so bloody true.

You just think I debate that, no, because you've got that level of, you know, if it's mutual. So parasites is purely one way, okay, there's absolutely no benefit. Yeah, totally. For you, the host, to that parasite. Yeah. But we know there are lots of benefits from our companionship with dogs. Yeah. Mutual. Let alone just the oxytocin release, let alone the mental well-being, you know, all of the stuff that comes. So there is a mutual benefit. Yeah, parasites without even talking Yeah, it's an aggravating word just to get the mask off.

Yeah, there you go.

That's not, you know, Conor, you were saying that you've got a little story about oxytocin. I'm just going to jump in before and just say it. What really struck me, that, you know, we were all taught about the flight, fight, or fright response. Okay, so for 100 years or so, we've had this ever since Selye in about the 1920s. He stressed animals and he got this adrenaline response, and it was like, oh my God, got to run away, or I've got to fight, or I've got to freeze, or something like this. And that is a stress response. And that was it. Bren, you were taught it. Conor, you were taught it. It's behavior. It's behavior 101. Okay. And that reflects the masculine nature of science through the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. And then in the '70s, women started coming in, and I think it was '87, in the States, there was a researcher who said, hang on a second, guys, there is another stress response, which is— and the previous ones are mediated by adrenaline and cortisol. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's it. There's another one. And it's called the tend and befriend response to stress. If you have a cave or a tribe and you get marauded by the next village, then one of the stress responses is to tend and befriend, which is mediated by oxytocin, which is the loving, the 'I want to give you a hug' thing. And the idea there is a survival response there, And it's not exclusively women, but it's very often manifest by women in that if they've got 2 or 3 children trailing along, they can't just run away. So if there is somebody marauding, it's like, guys, come on in, let's have a sit, think about this, have a cup of tea. Let's— don't stab me. Let's just have a cup of tea, have some food, and let's think about this. How can we work this together? That's the tendon befriend, which is fascinating. So it's masculine dominated. And so you get a masculine interpretation of stress and then the women come in from the '80s, God thank God, and we get a feminine response, a feminine interpretation of the stress response. So I think that's fascinating and it just shows science reflects society, which is— we could talk about that.

Well, you know, that's actually quite neat because that's exactly where we are with the whole animals can't feel emotion or they don't feel them in the same way we do, or animals can't love. It's because we spent so long thinking we were the center of the universe and that we aren't all one. And, you know, very, very similar to each other on every level you can possibly imagine. And certainly on an emotional level. I mean, they know that fish can feel pain. They know chickens can feel sadness. They can hook them up to MRIs and they can see exactly what's happening when things happen to, I mean, the lowliest of animals like a chicken, for example, and a fish. But rats and hamsters, guinea pigs, pigeons, they are all showing, at least on the lower level, the emotions. Okay, this is my second question to you, was going to be, but I'm not going to ask because it's just too— it's just too annoying. It's just like a philosophy question, but it's like, what, what is the difference between feelings and emotions? And really, only people that study that stuff are going to have an answer, because I'd imagine you guys think it's about as different as hair and fur. I certainly did. I mean, could you tell me the difference between feelings and emotions?

I think an emotion is a defined thing. You've got anger and you've got jealousy and you've got joy and what have you. And that's something that you can kind of define, whereas a feeling is possibly a bit of anger and a bit of jealousy and a bit of something else. And so it's a more complex, it's maybe a cocktail versus an emotion, which is a singly defined thing. Don't know, Bren, where would you go with that?

So I'm reading these comments. I'm sorry. Sorry, I'm reading these comments about, you know, people taking kisses from the dogs and is that going to be— that's just the whole raw thing, isn't it? People starting to go off on that one. Yeah, we can talk about dog kisses actually.

We must. Yeah, you'll get some. But yeah, they were saying that emotions are like, you know, they're saying picture a tree and emotions are like the branches of the tree. I'm just reading them off my phone because I'm going to confuse them for any of the behaviourists that are listening and waiting for me to fall into the trap. But like Rage, fear, lust, care, play— they're all emotions. There's actually hundreds of emotions, okay? We only can list off 10 or 20, but there's many, many different types. But your feelings are nearly how you feel as a result of that emotion. For example, if you're feeling lust, or if the emotion is lust, you know, that's coursing through you, it's a biological thing, it's, you know, there's hormones, there's all sorts of things involved, then you're feeling horny. Let's face it, that's, that's one of the feelings. Like, if you feel panic, then you actually feel sad, or you can actually feel annoyed, you know. So emotions can have different feelings depending on how you were brought up, depending on society, depending on how, you know, various different things. Like, for example, love, like actual being in love, has been found in 147 of 161 countries studied. In other words, in 13 countries they didn't find it. There isn't this idea of a romantic love and coupling idea. It's, it's like, it's almost like it has never been a critical part of society. Maybe it's a hunter-gatherer thing, maybe I don't have a clue, but I just thought that it wasn't found in some places was so interesting, this idea of being— so if feelings and emotions are separate— somebody asked on my page that, they said, do you mean feelings or emotions? And then you straight away, I was caught. I thought, oh, I don't know what I mean by feelings or emotions. But that's where humans can differ because Everyone's got these emotions. Every animal on the planet has got these emotions. We know our dogs feel love, for God's sake. It's so bloody obvious. But it was so egotistical, as Nick was saying, that we were the center of the universe. We can love them, but they can't love us back. Of course they can. They've got the exact same— just to list the 3 most important things that can prove it to you. They've got genes that code for loving behavior. They've got brain states that register and direct affection. That's your MRI scans that prove you get your owner's smell. Oh, I'm so in love. And then they've also got the same hormones that course as a result of it. So what do you think they lack in, in terms of love? They've got the exact same things going on as we have. That's like, so what is it? Only there's only a religious context that can possibly be rude, like, well, you don't get a soul. Oh, give me a break with you, you know.

Super, super, super interesting, Bren. When we were at college, we were taught that, that animals only have clinical signs, but now they have symptoms. Just give us a little rundown on that, because that clinical signs used to drive me insane. Sorry, I'm not going to spoil it. What are your thoughts on that one?

Well, look, you know, that there is that— I guess there's part of it because of, you know, us being vets trying to bring into the farming community, trying to almost divorce ourselves from, um, the, the fact that those animals that we're rearing are going to have that level of sentience and emotion that, you know, it would make it incredibly hard to then square that circle as far as dealing with that stress of thinking that we're, you know, farming these sentient beings, which, you know, quite frankly, they are. And I've sat amongst the goats and that side of things. There's that, you know, um, you have to, uh, come to, to be able to, you know, connect with those to give them quality of life for the time that they've got. You know, I think, and I guess that also then came through on a small animal side, that, you know, it was a way of trying to pre-program you as a clinician that ultimately you could take a step back, divorce yourself from connection with those animals, come up with a solution, and if that solution wasn't going to give them a welfare outcome, you could go forward and say, okay, it's time to say enough's enough. Okay. And I think the longer I've been in veterinary medicine, the more I have felt that actually I don't think that's the right way. I feel emotional connection and dealing with that is really important in how to cope, you know, understanding that you've got to have that connection with the patient for me, those mental signs, especially doing, you know, going through homeopathy, the mental and emotional signs that those animals give is part of the disease, is so important in treating the disease. And actually comes out that that has to be almost a central edifice to that whole treatment, because if you cannot correct that, get that right, and you've just got, yeah, bodily they're going on, but mentally they're totally distraught and, you know, not there. That's not a life for those pets and companions.

You know, maybe that's—

you've got to then be strong enough to be that pillar for the owner, the pet, the clinicians around you to actually say, okay, we've got to call it at the right time to make sure they've got quality to the end.

What an emotional toll. And surely what you're alluding to there is one of the reasons why vets are under such emotional pressure. You know, you can see by not all— okay, the dropout rate of vets is increasing at a shocking rate, but like, there's— it is clearly a profession that people get under stress very quickly. I mean, we've talked about the suicide rates before and that kind of stuff, but it's clearly— I wonder, is that part of it, that it takes a serious emotional toll to do some of the stuff that we don't see being done all the time? And then the PTSD stuff and that kind of end-of-life stuff, that might take a serious toll. You're dealing with the clients and their grief, and who trains you to do that? And then you're on to the next client like it's normal. Bottle that up, off you go, come on.

I mean, as a practice, that is something that we've embraced. You know, we have that mental health coaching, we bring that in to support people. The level of support that we give each other is totally changed to when I first qualified. You know, it was literally, you know, just get on with it, just Yeah, you know, these are the symptoms, as Nick says, these are the clinical signs, this is the, you know, almost algebraic, this is what they have, therefore this is the treatment that you throw at them, and then you look at the outcomes and you continue in that cycle and you just get through it. Whereas certainly joining the practice that I now run, that develops with complementary medicine, I think, you know, probably that is the thing that changes you more and more towards, you know, looking at alternates, looking at other things that will enhance the quality of life for the patients you're helping. Okay. And, you know, I think the more you get into that, then the more you can sort of transpose that into your clinicians, that you start to help all of those around you. That's the clinicians. It's not just about the vets, it's about the nurses, it's about the Even the people at the front desk, you know, they are an integral part of veterinary practice and actually have a great role to play because they're the ones often talking to the clients, you know, as soon as they walk in, whilst they're waiting, you know, as they're walking out. They befriend so many of them, you know, they have that emotional connection, they act as support, you know. So at every level there's some degree of support going to the clients, going to their companions.

Yeah, that's cool, that's cool. We don't talk about that a lot. You don't hear about that, certainly as non-vets. You don't get that side of us. You just assume that's all in hand, but it's very kind of a stiff upper lip stuff, you know, back in the day, I imagine, which did not help at all. But now maybe things are changing and people are talking. Nick was mentioning this oxytocin study, so we were told this in college, right? This was a gem. So oxytocin is this cool hormone and mothers, parents, particularly mothers produce huge amounts of it right after birth, as soon as the baby's put on and then the baby as well. There's also a hormone in breast milk and I'm not sure if it's oxytocin that's in breast milk as well, it possibly is, but there's a hormone in breast milk and I meant to look up but I didn't find the name of it, maybe you guys know it, that reduces separation anxiety. In rats and pigeons. And I just heard it on— I was just YouTubing what's the difference between feelings and emotions before I came on so I could look smarter than you, and I forgot everything I heard. But they did say this oxytocin hormone— I can't remember the name of the hormone that's in breast milk that they isolated, which reduced separation anxiety, which I thought was kind of interesting.

So that's really interesting because you will find there's other things that are within breast milk. Okay. And this is one of the reasons why we love dairy so much is also some of the proteins and things like the tryptophans and stuff like that that will come through that will increase serotonin. I know gut serotonin, but then it's back to when you increase gut serotonin, you actually get increased vagal nerve stimulation back to the brain to cause that calming. It's not just about the serotonin getting across the blood-brain barrier, which I know you hate the idea of because it shouldn't seep that way, Conor. But yeah, there's that. There's also the pheromones from around when they're suckling. This is the reason that suckling can be so much more effective than bottle feeding. And actually, those pheromones are just as important hormones interaction as anything like oxytocin coming through in milk.

They were trying to, in the '70s and '80s, they were trying to isolate the pheromones that attracted people to each other. Okay. As humans still give off these pheromones, it's in our sweat, it comes out. Certain times, you know, and pheromones play a key role even if you don't realize it. But they isolated some of the pheromones. I can't remember which one it was. It could easily be oxytocin, I don't know. But when they isolated it, they put it in this juice called Spanish Fly, a really famous kind of stuff that guys would try and spray on themselves and make themselves more attractive to the opposite sex or to whatever sex. And so they'd walk around the place with this Spanish Fly on, and it was always being sold in the back of magazines and all sorts of stuff, and it was a really big seller. Seller in the late '70s. But the guy that discovered us, um, said that he used to like come out of the lab after playing with this chemical going, I think I found something here, this could be useful. And he said people will come and sit beside him on the bus. This is them— he was, he was selling the stuff, so I know these are good stories. But, uh, he said people, when there was empty seats, people will come and sit beside him. They wouldn't even know why because he's, he's just oozing all these pheromones. But they put his stuff to the test. They put this— what bloody hormone, I just can't get the name of it, in this classic study. And it was a study of, um, of— it was a dental surgery, and they set up the waiting room in a perfect rectangle, and they had a female, um, receptionist, okay, on one side, and then they had the two long bits and the short bit there. And they found that it was a male pheromone that the women should like. And what they found was when they let the clinic just run normally, that when women came in, they wouldn't sit directly on the wall directly opposite the female receptionist. They would sit on one of the walls, on one of the opposite walls, to avoid direct contact, whereas most males would sit right in the chair that was directly opposite so they could stare at her. Okay, so males would sit directly opposite the receptionist and females wouldn't. Okay, about 10% of females would sit in those seats, but, you know, maybe they were attracted. So what they found was that females wouldn't sit in those seats, but when they sprayed that pheromone under the seat of the opposite, they found the females gravitated to the top seats even though it was directly opposite a female, which they normally from a confrontation point of view wouldn't do. And I just thought how interesting these pheromones, you don't even know they're going on and they're directing you.

I just thought— Brilliant. I've got another love story here. Okay, so they've done this experiment numerous times and they get a machine, a little robot, okay, that can move in 4 directions, okay? And they put it within a pen, okay? And On top of that little mini robot, they put a mother hen, a picture of a— not even a picture, a kind of a model with feathers of a mother hen. Okay. And next to it on one wall of this square, yeah, on the floor, they put a load of chicks, okay, who have been habituated to that feathery model on top of the thing. And what they find is that when they program the robot to randomly move around that square, when the chicks are not there, you will get completely random movement of said robot. But when the chicks are there, who think it's their mummy, the robot will spend more time in the quarter of that square close to the chicks.

Plus, plus, that just can't be. They did the same.

They did the same.

Has it run over a chick and it's stuck?

No, no, because there's a wall.

There's a wall. There's a wall. So, and there's another one where they do the same with a cat with a bar heater, which is on a random switch. Sometimes it's on, sometimes it's off. And when the cat is not present, you get a random pattern. And when the cat is present, it's on more than it's off.

Why? I don't get that. I don't get the machinery part of it. I don't know.

Somehow it's that thing that the observer influences that which is observed. That's what those two— yeah, which is what Goethe was saying 250 years ago. Check it out. It's well recognized. This is, yeah, well recognized stuff. They'll probably turn around and say it was a fix, but it sounds right. Yeah, I think it sounds—

I've heard of similar, yeah, I've heard of similar very strange phenomenon that I observed that way. There's— look, the thing is, there is loads of studies. If you were to kind of— there was a famous behaviorist called Hamilton, and he's probably still alive, but you know, in the, in the early 2000s, he had done an enormous amount of work on feelings and emotion, love, really started doing a lot of work on animals. And he started warning that we shouldn't look too much into the whole love thing, because while you might reduce it down to a biochemical reaction, oxytocin, and like, there's loads of studies of dogs where you stare at a dog, you release oxytocin. So it's a feedback loop. If a dog stares at you and you look back at them, Oxytocin, the dog gets a warm hug for himself and you get a warm hug for yourself. They can spray oxytocin in the nose of a dog you don't know and the dog will come up and just gaze at you lovingly and you'll look back at the dog and go, ah, and then you release oxytocin even though you didn't get the spray. So there's loads of these studies and this guy Hamilton was saying not to, to be careful about how much you try and define and maybe that's a romantic way of looking at it because it's such a critical part of how we go about it. But the guy that wrote the book Love Is Dog or Dog Is Love, I can't remember his name. Clyde somebody. Someone's going to put up Dr.

Conor Brady. Like, see, as if somebody think I've prepared that.

Yeah, the reviews. I've ordered that. It's going to be coming to me, but I don't have it. I only ordered 2 days ago.

Professor of Arizona State University. That's right. In psychology. Yeah.

And it seems that this guy, if you look at a lot of the stuff he's written, he's written a lot of different stuff online. But it seems that the guy came from a very strong viewpoint of what I would have learned in college is be very wary of anthropomorphism. In other words, don't try and humanize the animal. It's like, I'm bloody not humanizing. I know he's a dog. So this is the old school way. I'm pretty sure I was the last student to learn it that way. And he learned that way. And he set about looking for interesting bits and pieces that might prove him wrong. A good scientist. And he found there were so many little gems in this book, apparently, that hasn't come to me yet. I highly recommend you pick it up. But I like the fact that he starts off thinking this is just anthropomorphism. But he's the guy that lists all the reasons why this would be love. And he made a nice point. He said, you know, if you wonder why dogs get attached to humans, he goes, can you imagine if, like, when the plains— when we have big, huge arid plains and then it turned to forests after the Ice Age, with all these forests popping up, and we needed something to help us hunt because we're not very good at hunting in trees. And that's one of the reasons why that we really started working with dogs together. And he goes, can you imagine how close dogs would be with people 10,000 years ago when you depended on them for hunting and for food and for protection. Like, they would just be units of the family. Like, you would— they will be such a vital part of your existence if you were living in kind of a tree kind of scenario where there was predators. And dogs alert you to all that. They protect your young. You can leave them in, you know, it's— he says, like, it's small wonder dogs have evolved this. He calls it a pathological tendency for affection. And he said, because dogs will actually, compared to wolves— there's no point comparing dogs to wolves, okay? This is, you know, there is very little point in doing that. Clearly the wolves don't dig us as much as dogs do. But he said dogs will actually spend more time with strangers than wolves will with their owners. So dogs have this pathological tendency, 'Oh, love me, like me, do you like me, pat me on the head.' And he says, but can you— it's small wonder that happens because we were so we worked as such a tight unit back in the day. And I thought, that's interesting. I never thought about how critical this tool was for us, if you call them a tool back in the day, you know. Now it's more companion-like, but the dog is left with this, you know, besotted engineering that just absolutely gets huge feedback, chooses an owner's pat over food, releases more oxytocin when they smell their owner as opposed to if they thought they were going to get a treat. So they choose those things and they get a positive feedback loop for it. And it's small wonder they do. So I just love dogs. So the book sounds absolutely fantastic.

If you're looking for more phenomenon where, where things are going above and beyond the normal, what you'd expect from dogs, which is kind of where this conversation is going, which is not where we designed it to go. In fact, we didn't design it in the slightest. As usual, we just run with wherever we go. But there is a wonderful book book by Sheldrake, like that. Here you're being bombarded. This is really going to upset everybody. So you've got Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. I'm having to read that in mirror language. That's a really fascinating book if you want to just look at phenomena outside the normal, as we've been discussing just now. There's, there's another—

and the reference that I held up was, uh, Conor's Oxytocin Stare reference.

Oh yeah, just give us that again, Bren, because we were a bit distracted. Okay, what's, uh, Oxytocin Gaze Positive Loop and Co-Evolution of Dog Something Oxidation Stare in Science 2017. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

There's a quote from— yes, yeah, sorry, there's a quote from one of those studies there, Bren, that you shared during the week that we were looking at. And it said that the genes of domestic dogs are very similar to humans with a syndrome called Williams-Byrne syndrome. Have you heard of this, guys? And yeah, and Williams-Byrne syndrome, because of the lack of this gene or the gene is switched on or off in these certain individuals, it creates behavior described as hypersocial, where the people that suffer the syndrome become exceptionally gregarious exceptionally gregarious. So Wynne decides to visit a summer camp for children with the syndrome, and although he felt guilty about making the comparison, he couldn't help but notice that it looked like he was watching a whole camp of kids pretending to be dogs. Well, so he was the guy that started looking at the genes for this hyper-social kind of effect that dogs have, and he says it's not to lessen the love that they have, but the conclusion of the book, it seems, what strikes most people, most behaviors and what he said was that we need to really seriously address our use of negative punishment on dogs. It's positive punishment, any sort of heavy-handedness. You need to seriously rethink how you're training people to work with them. Separation anxiety, it's like this is an animal that is profoundly attached to you and, you know, some of us are leaving them for 10 hours a day and we're wondering how to train that out of the dog and, you know, it's kind of like the trainer's call to see how best to fit this dog into the situation and he reiterates the call for like, this is a highly social animal and to remove him from that kind of pack mentality, he says, is something that needs a bit more thought. And people say it now and again, but when you actually get the science behind this dog, like my dog particularly is just like, it's like he's got this on steroids. He is so, so profoundly attached to me that when I'm gone, he just sits at the door, he lies at the door. Like it's boring, pathetic guys, I have to say it. I know he loves me a lot and there's, but there's loads of kids in the house, you know, there's people running around, there's other things to do. And I know if I got another dog, he'd just ignore him. He would just— he just has this profound attachment to me. I don't know where it came from, but now I'm starting to appreciate it a bit more. I really feel sorry for him that he has this absolute profound— I mean, I've got it for him as well, of course, but like, I don't think he's missing me when I'm gone, you know. So, uh, anyway, what can you do? He's a cocker spaniel as well. Maybe they're older.

You've got that for him except for the weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had to get that dig in.

Sorry, it's like the kids. I mean, I like being around them for bits, you know, and then the oxytocin wears off and it's like, it's just the rage hormone.

It might be a spaniel thing. I mean, Artie, uh, you see her little picture here and there and everywhere, um, and she is exactly the same. It actually drives Christina nuts. She you know, from a point of view of if I go out the house, she will sit at the door waiting for me, you know. And or if I sit down on the sofa, she might have been cuddling my wife for the rest of the day, you know, because it's like, give me a cuddle. And all of a sudden, in my face, immediately sit, relax, like right nose to nose.

And he knows, he knows he can't be licking my face all the time. So he just like his nose, we know And just sit there staring at me frozen while we're sitting there watching. Just a little bit of the time. Yeah, no, not all the time. His breath on my cheek. And it's like, Daddy, would you relax? Would you relax? Just— I'm going— oh God, I don't know what it is.

You need to tell the ladies. They were asking earlier, do you let him lick your mouth?

Oh, that is a very interesting thing. I'm glad you brought that up. Does, um—

let's do it. Let's do it on Patreon.

Oh, you tease. You tease. Oh yes, there you go.

Do you want to know more about tongue in Conor Brady's mouth?

Please join us. There was a critical line that the public need to hear, as opposed to our patrons, is that it was a guy who was talking about all the benefits, but he said, he concluded, don't snog the dog. I just thought that was a great line. But a few little licks here and there. Anyway, we'll get to it. There's some interesting stuff in that. Yeah.

Bless you guys. Love to you all. Thank you for joining us on Valentine's Eve. And hope you can go and give your dogs a hug.

Yes, absolutely. Share that oxytocin, guys. Enjoy it.

We'll see you on Patreon, and it'll be with you in about an hour or so. It takes time to