Keynote: Alexandra Horowitz, MA, PhD
Eyes on the dog
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Abstract: Translating the scholarly research from dog cognition and dog-human interaction studies to a general audience is an opportunity to remind people of how to be amateur ethologists -- how to observe companion animals and take into account their points of view. In turn, this engagement has allowed me to look back at the science we do and consider whether or how we are taking animals' point of view into account in our research. I discuss various ways we might foreground the animal in research, and the challenges involved in doing research while keeping well-being in mind.
Dr. Horowitz is a researcher and professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard, studying the behavior and mind of owned dogs. She has long been interested in understanding the umwelt of another animal, and her research and writing is aimed to answer the question of what it is like to be a dog. She has written five books, including Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, a New York Times bestseller, Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell, Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond, and, most recently The Year of the Puppy, which will be published in September 2022. She earned her Master's and Doctoral degrees in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego, and her Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.