I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating. It's a project that we started about five years ago to try and see if we could help graduate more service dogs by looking at the cognitive development of puppies.

Nobody really had ever looked to see when skills that are important for training when they first emerge.

When is it that memory or self-control or their ability to understand our communication or eye contact that they need to make with us to be trained?

When does that first develop?

When does a puppy start doing all those things?

Nobody knew.

That's Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare.

Together they run the puppy kindergarten at Duke University's

K-9 Cognition Center. Their goal is to figure out what will make a great service dog while the dog is

still a puppy. The book they've written about what they've discovered has some surprises and some useful lessons for dog

owners because it turns out that what makes a great service dog is also what makes a great dog, period.

This will be great to talk about because I love dogs and anybody who loves dogs I think is

going to be fascinated with this conversation.

Brian, when we first met, we were talking about chimps. I remember there was a big window between

us and the chimps. And while we were talking, one of them threw himself at the glass window

and nearly scared me out of my pants. Me too. That was Hondo. Yeah, me too. He's threw his whole body at the window.

Yeah, we've come a lot of a long way. Now we work with puppies who don't do that.

That put us over the edge. How did you get into working with puppies and dogs? I remember a story

about Oreo from your book. Was that the beginning of it for you?

So my childhood dog, I, you know, I was kind of raised by a Labrador Retriever. And he was just like any dog.

He liked to play fetch. And when he played fetch, sometimes he lost his ball and I would point to where it was.

And so as a kid, I never thought anything about it.

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