Dogs And Cats Can Live In Perfect Harmony In The Home, If Introduced The Right Way

Want your pets to get along? If the cat is adopted before the dog and if they are introduced when still young there is a high probability that your two pets will get along great. (Credit: iStockphoto/Mehmet Salih Guler)

Thinking about adopting a perky little puppy as a friend for your fluffy cat, but worried that they’ll fight -- well, like cats and dogs?

Think again. New research at Tel Aviv University, the first of its kind in the world, has found a new recipe for success. According to the study, if the cat is adopted before the dog and if they are introduced when still young (less than 6 months for kittens, a year for dogs), there is a high probability that your two pets will get along swimmingly.

Results from the research were recently reported in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

“This is the first time anyone has done scientific research on pets living in the same home,” says Prof. Joseph Terkel, from the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University. “It’s especially relevant to the one-third of Americans who own a pet and are thinking about adopting a second one of the opposite species.”

Talk Like a Dog

After interviewing almost 200 pet owners who own both a cat and a dog, then videotaping and analyzing the animals’ behavior, TAU researchers concluded that cats and dogs can cohabitate happily if certain conditions are met. Prof. Terkel and his graduate student Neta-li Feuerstein found that two-thirds of the homes they surveyed reported a positive relationship between their cat and dog.

But it wasn’t all sweetness and light (or, for that matter, bones and catnip). There was a reported indifference between the cat and dog in 25% of the homes, while aggression and fighting were observed in 10% of the homes.

One reason for the fighting might have been crossed inter-species signals. Cats and dogs may not have been able to read each other’s body cues. For instance, cats tend to lash their tails about when mad, while dogs growl and arch their backs. A cat purrs when happy, while a dog wags its tail. A cat’s averted head signals aggression, while in a dog the same head position signals submission.

In homes where cat/dog détente existed, Prof. Terkel observed a surprising behavior. “We found that cats and dogs are learning how to talk each other’s language. It was a surprise that cats can learn how to talk ‘Dog’ and vice versa.”

What’s especially interesting, Prof. Terkel remarks, is that both cats and dogs have appeared to evolve beyond their instincts. They can learn to read each other’s body signals, suggesting that the two species may have more in common than was previously suspected.

Peacemaking Pets Can Be a Model for People

Once familiar with each others’ presence and body language, cats and dogs can play together, greet each other nose-to-nose, and enjoy sleeping together on the couch. They can easily share the same water bowl and in some cases groom each other. The far-reaching implications of this Tel Aviv University research on cats and dogs may extend beyond pets -- to people who don’t get along, including neighbours, colleagues at work, and even world superpowers.

“If cats and dogs can learn to get along,” concludes Prof. Terkel, “surely people have a good chance.”

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Stephen Hawking: Large Hadron Collider vital for humanity

By Jon Swaine

Science editor Roger Highfield on what the LHC will do. ; http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1488655367/bctid1466839008 http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=1139053637

Prof Hawking said the £4.4bn machine, in which scientists are about to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, is "vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out."

And he sought to ease fears that the machine could have apocalyptic effects. "The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on," Prof Hawking said, adding: "The LHC is absolutely safe."

Scientists at the CERN research centre in Switzerland are aiming to use the machine to gain a better understanding of the birth and structure of the universe, and to fill gaps in our knowledge of physics.

They hope that by recreating the moments after the Big Bang - the massive explosion thought to have created the universe - the experiment will make clearer what the universe is made of, what makes it expand and also to predict its future.

Prof Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, said: "The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four."

However, he doubts that the machine will have the power to unravel some of the universe's more elusive secrets such as the putative Higgs boson particle - thought to have given mass to all other particles.

Prof Hawking said he has placed a bet of $100 that the scientists won't find the Higgs boson - the so-called "God particle."

"Another discovery that we might make is superpartners, partners for all the particles we know ... they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together," he told BBC Radio 4.

"Whatever the LHC finds or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe," Prof Hawking added.

However he dismissed speculation that the world could be put in grave danger by the force of the experiment.

"The LHC is absolutely safe. If the collisions in the LHC produced a micro black hole - and this is unlikely - it would just evaporate away again, producing a correctoristic pattern of particles," he said.

"Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth's atmosphere and nothing terrible happens. The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on."

However he pointed out that if the LHC were indeed to create minor black holes, his own work on the subject could be verified and he chould receive the highest acclaim in the field.

He said: "If the LHC were to produce little black holes, I don't think there is any doubt I would get a Nobel Prize, if they showed the properties I predict.

"However I think the the probability that the LHC has enough energy to produce little black holes is less than 1 per cent - so I'm not holding my breath."

Asked whether the results of the LHC experiment would offer immediate practical benefits for our day-to-day lives, Prof Hawking urged patience.

He said: "Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe, rather than practical applications for commercial gain. But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits.

"It is difficult to see an economic return from research at the LHC, but that doesn't mean there wont be any."

Prof Hawking made clear that the LHC project is one of the most important in the history of scientific endeavour. Asked to choose between it and the space program, he said: "That is like asking which of my children I would choose to sacrifice.

"Both the LHC and the Space program are vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out. Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race can not afford this, then it doesn't deserve the epithet 'human'."

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The Large Hadron Collider Will Not Destroy the World Tomorrow, or Ever

By Matt Blum

You'd better read this today, because it's possible the world will end tomorrow. Strictly speaking, the probability of doomsday isn't any higher than it is on any normal Wednesday, but there's been a fair bit of kerfuffle and hullabaloo over the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and whether it will create a black hole that will destroy the entire planet. There's even been a rap written about it.

Now, more skilled scientific minds than mine have debunked these doomsayers, but the stories are out there, and kids are bound to hear them. They're bound to have questions, including wanting to know what a hadron is, why scientists want to smash them together, and, by the way, are these European scientists about to suck the world into a black hole? Well, if they've taken high school chemistry, they've probably learned about protons and neutrons, so you can explain that both of those are in fact types of hadrons. You probably don't want to get into their valence quarks, unless you really understand quantum physics and don't mind your kids tuning you out. As for why they're doing it, it boils down to the search for the Higgs boson, also called the "God Particle," which is the only elementary particle that has never been observed by science. If your kids ask why that's so important, point out that it was nuclear research that led to the creation of the Internet, and they may just finally understand why science is so important! If they're also interested in how the LHC works, point them to this explanation on HowStuffWorks.

Now, the other question is a bit tougher, because you (I assume) don't want to outright lie to your kids, but you don't want to alarm them, either. It is actually possible, as I understand it, that the experiment will create subatomic black holes that will last a tiny fraction of a second before collapsing. But the likelihood of these black holes becoming the more well-known kind of black hole is nearly nonexistent.

That being said, if you've raised your kids in the proper GeekDad fashion, they'll have read a lot of science fiction by the time they hit high school. And sci-fi is, of course, full of stories about scientists with good intentions going too far and causing horrible consequences. So it's entirely understandable if your kids are a bit concerned about what's going on on the border between Switzerland and France.

My advice? Just tell them that there's really no chance at all that the world will end in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow. Seriously, how many times can you tell your kids something about the future without even the slightest worry you'll be proved wrong? If you tell them that and you're wrong, I guarantee your kids will never confront you about it.

OK, that may not have been as reassuring as I'd intended. Sorry about that. Seriously, unless every preeminent physicist in the world is very wrong, the LHC is perfectly safe. That's good enough for me.

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