We spoke to Herzog Friday about his new book, asking him about the notorious "cat bin lady" and "puppy throwing girl," whether children who harm animals grow up to be serial killers, and whether we'll have to come to peace with the undeniable similarities between the animals we love, and those we love to eat.

Why is it so hard to think straight about animals?

I think it's the human-meat relationship. The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote "Animal Liberation" [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that's been occurring. The question is, why?

And, by the way, I think that the argument against eating meat is very strong.

On many levels. Michael Pollan's mantra of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," along with the larger understanding that meat eating puts an incredible burden on the planet, has created a new energy around vegetarianism. But is it just the same people who have always kind of been concerned about this stuff?

No, I think not necessarily. I think there are also cases of, for example, the passage of the chicken welfare proposition in California [Proposition 2]; that passed, while the gay marriage proposition on the same ballot was defeated. The chicken amendment -- it was chickens and pigs -- there was no party affiliation. Both liberals and conservatives voted for that. So I think in some ways we are more concerned about animal welfare than ever before. So it's actually a great paradox.

I think the fact is that we're natural meat-eaters. And a lot of my vegetarian friends don't like that. But it's our biology and our evolutionary heritage. It's tough to fight that. That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight it. But most people lose that balance. And two-thirds of vegetarians eventually resume eating meat.

What was it about the two giant viral videos of the past few weeks -- the London woman, Mary Bale, who tried to trash that cat; the Bosnian woman who threw puppies from a bridge -- that caused such a giant furor?

I think there are a couple of  things involved in that. One is that they both involved women. And this is a little bit of an anomaly, because if you look at animal cruelty trials and (data), I think it's that 90 to 95 percent are men behind them. So that's one reason why this went viral; it's the surprising idea of women being cruel in this way.

The bigger thing is they're both pet species, though. I've been thinking about this. I just went back this morning, and I uncovered a piece in the New York Times from 1877. And it's actually fascinating. They had a stray dog population, so what they did is they rounded up 750 stray dogs. They took them to the East River, and they had a large metal cage -- it took them all day to do this -- they would put 50 dogs at a time, 48 dogs at a time in this metal, iron cage, and lower it into the East River with a crane.

Wow.

Until the animals drowned. And then they would pull them out and they sold the carcasses for their leather, for a dollar each. And then they'd put another 50 dogs in there. And they started doing this at 7:30 in the morning, and they did it well into the afternoon. And so drowning animals was actually an acceptable way of dealing with pet overpopulation in 1877. Now it seems horrifying. I watched that girl toss those puppies into the river, and it was just horrifying.

And I think there's something else that's sort of an interesting difference in the two cases. And it has to do with something I really deal with in the book a lot, which is the whole tension between logic and emotion, and why we do things. And -- have you looked at both of the videos?

I've seen the cat video, but I had to halt the puppy video before the first puppy was tossed.

OK, here's what happens with the cat video: We have this middle-aged woman who works at a bank. She's walking by, she sees this cat. And we can actually see this on the video, what she does. She walks past him. She then looks at the cat, she looks back, and then she sort of sees that there's a trash can there and then it's like she's automatized, she's not thinking at all. She simply puts the cat in the trash and closes the thing and walks on down the road. Later, she said basically, I don't know why I did this. She says, I cannot explain why I did this, it was a split second of misjudgment. And even later she couldn't explain why. It's an interesting case of what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls "moral dumbfounding." She does this thing and doesn't know why she does it.

The Bosnia case, on the other hand, is a little bit different because there's a premeditated quality to it. She took these puppies, these six puppies, to this river, and she heaves them in, and actually set up somebody to videotape it. But when she was later asked, she then came up with this post-hoc reasoning. And she's now made a video apology, and she sort of blames her grandmother ... my grandmother asked me to do it, they were only 4 days old, they were sick, they had parasites, and it was the humane way to kill them. I'm not buying the logic of that at all. But I'm saying what she did then was she constructed this logic, she tried to make sense of what she did.

I think that this idea really plays out in our interactions with animals. In moral decisions generally, there's tension. We do things, and we don't know why we do them, sometimes. We then come up with the reason why. It makes sense, even if it doesn't.

I thought about my cockfighting pals, you know, when I was hanging out [for the book] with these rooster fighters. These rooster fighters had a fairly intricate set of moral logical framework in which cockfighting not only becomes not bad, it becomes actually good for the moral model for your children, something to be desired.

What was their rationale?

Well, the most common rationale is the same one that you hear from chicken eaters: It's natural. It's really funny, I was telling a woman one time about these cockfighters, and she was telling me how disgusting it was and somehow it came around to eating chicken. I said, "Whoa, you eat chicken, how do you feel about that?" and she said, "Well, that's different because that's natural." That's exactly what the rooster fighters told me.

Right, and you make the point in the book that the cockfighters take good care of them, as opposed to the chicken we eat, which usually live very short, very miserable lives.

Right. By the way, I don't want to be seen as defending cockfighting. I'm opposed to it. I've never really bought their justification. But the fact is, there is actually less harm done by rooster fighting than there is by eating chicken.

Your point about the two video culprits -- that part of the shock is that they were women -- is interesting.

But by the way, one thing about women and animal cruelty: Women typically do not do things like those women do, but women actually are engaged in a different type of animal cruelty. And that's that women are more likely than men to be animal hoarders.

What would be worse if you were a dog? Being thrown into a river and drowned, or living a life of an animal in a hoarding situation, where you're slowly starving to death? So the cruelty of hoarding is in a way greater than the cruelty of these instances. And two-thirds of hoarders are women.

And yet the perversion there is that hoarders feel that they're actually saving the animals.

Totally. That's the perversion that I'd say comes from loving too much, and not being able to draw a moral line. If we would agree that women tend to be more nurturing than men, hoarding is sort of the extreme version of that. Which can be just as cruel as the sort of brutality that men perpetuate through hunting and rooster fighting and all of that stuff.

I'm as fascinated by the response to those videos -- not just Michael Bay's bounty -- as I am shocked by the acts of cruelty.

One of the things I love about studying human-animal interaction is that they tell us a lot about human nature. Not in these specific ones, but generally, we see the best in human behavior and the worst in human behavior. In this case, it's the worst, and not only was the worst behavior in the treatment of the animals. I went on Facebook, and there was a site immediately constructed called Death to Mary Bale, and I looked at what people were saying about her and it was just unbelievable. And it wasn't just that they wanted to kill her, it was the way that they wanted to kill her. People got so riled up about this.

But I also think people become fearful when they see videos like this, because they believe people who are cruel to animals are truly dangerous. I know you have a portion of the book devoted to the issue of whether children who abuse animals become violent or don't.

This is a major controversy in my field, anthrozoology. There's two schools of thought. And people are sincere on both sides, and I respect both their arguments. And it's become a fairly acrimonious debate in some ways. And the standard thinking is the belief in this thing called "the link," and that is that there is a strong link -- it's often implied as a causal link -- between childhood animal abuse and growing up to be a sociopathic adult. And so, what link advocates say is that oftentimes when they give talks they'll say, Well, every serial killer abused animals when they were a kid; every school shooter abused animals. Well, I've looked at government reports, and that's simply untrue. And furthermore, and again this is not my research, this is other people's research, but if you actually look at the rate of abuse -- and it's really hard to get good statistics on this, because people in prison tend to be liars – a slew of studies have now shown that the rates of abuse by college students is about the same in terms of rate of abuse by prisoners.

Now, granted, in some cases the prisoners, it's a viler type of abuse. So the question is, how predictive is this? What I do in the book is, I went around and asked my friends, "Hey, did you ever abuse an animal?" And what I found is what other researchers have found; that, yeah, a lot of people have a history of cruelty.

Margaret Mead once said, "The worst thing that can happen to a kid is to abuse an animal and to get away with it." Because that's going to give him license to be like that later. I don't think the link is as strong as some of the link proponents. I think we should be concerned with childhood cruelty, but not necessarily because these kids are going to turn into sociopaths. I found a striking statement in Darwin's autobiography where he says, "I beat a puppy when I was a child just for the power of it." Charles Darwin.

But then what do you think about Mead's proposition? That if they get away with it, it's somehow damaging?

The vast majority of kids get away with it, and most people are going to grow up to be fine human beings.

This is related to something else, the larger romance around the notion that animals have a civilizing effect on people. There are, of course, all of these programs where animals are brought in to work with prisoners. But many people talk about how good it is for children to be around animals as they grow up.

Well, one of the reasons Katherine Grier, who wrote probably the best history of pets in America, said that pet keeping really took off among the middle class between the 1800s and early 1900s was because it was a movement to make children better people. That raising a dog or a cat in your family if you were a kid was actually a way to learn nurturing skills and responsibility and all this stuff. I think there's some truth to that. I think there's no doubt about bringing animals into prisons, that bringing animals into retirement homes increases morale and my guess is that for some people it's a real transformative experience.

But I have a section in the book where I talk about whether pets are good for people. And I think they've been sort of overrated as being good for people. Some studies have found they are, and some studies have shown that they're not particularly good for people; there's been kind of a mixed bag.

I can understand how it's been overrated, but how can it be a mixed bag? How could having a pet actually be bad?

I can give piles of examples of that. There's a number of people that are bitten by pets every year. There's a shocking number of people that trip over their pet and wind up in the hospital. There's the fact that pets are the biggest source of conflict between neighbors. There are a set of studies that show that pets are good for people. But there's another set of studies we can see, where they show that pet owners drink more. Pet owners are more likely to use pain-relieving medicine. Stuff like that.

I don't take these things too seriously, and I don't think that pets are particularly bad for people. But on the other hand, I think that pets have been somewhat overblown. I mean, there's books you can buy that will tell you that pets will cure almost any ill that you have, and I know one book I won't mention that basically says, if everybody would get a pet, people would lay down their arms, and there would be world peace. There's no evidence, for instance, that swimming with dolphins cures autism.

What about the scientific studies that suggest that growing up with pets can lead to healthier immune systems because they are exposed to more bacteria, etc.?

I've looked at a bunch of those studies, and some have shown that kids with pets are less likely to get asthma, and that makes sense to me -- although there are one or two that say having pets increases asthma. But I think the preponderance of evidence says it has a good effect. A good study in England found that kids with pets were less likely to miss school by having a sick day.

But the other thing you have in these cases is that we have very few control studies. There are a lot of studies looking at the psychological well-being of people who have pets [where the people] are better off to begin with -- they have more money, they have more energy required to take care of a pet. So the problem we have is determining cause and effect. There are a few studies that I think are good that have found a cause and effect, but not many.

So is the solution just to come to terms with the disconnect between loving our cat and treating it like a family member and enjoying our fried chicken?

I think that's the human condition. I think this humanization of pets is really fascinating. I developed a tongue-in-cheek scale that I called "feeding kittens or boa constrictors" scale. I asked people, "Would it be OK to feed snakes versus cats certain types of food?" One was mice: Would it be OK to feed a mouse to a boa constrictor? Is it OK to feed a mouse to a cat?

Almost everyone said it was not OK to feed a mouse to a cat. I interviewed a student who had cats. I said, "Would you ever feed a dead mouse to your cat? You can buy them at the pet store." She said, "No!" She was horrified. And I asked why. She had this great quote. She said, "If my cat ate mice, it wouldn't be like me."

I love that. And that really gets it. When we admit cats and animals into our world, and we think of them like relatives and we think of them like us, it makes perfect sense for us to think that, yes, they'd rather have a gourmet natural duck entree out of a can than eat a mouse. No, my pet really enjoys dressing up for Halloween. And so we basically have drawn that moral circle so that we think of them more like us than like them. I don't really see that as changing.

Did you struggle with these issues yourself? Did you go through a vegetarian phase?

I never did that. I still struggle with cat ownership. I have a cat. I was going to write a postscript to the book, and I was going to talk about my moral issues as a cat owner knowing that, if I were a cat, I would like my owner to let me outside so that I could go kill things, which is the most fun thing in the world for a cat. And yet, it's going to put me at risk for the coyote that lives in my backyard or I'm going to go out and kill these creatures that don't deserve to die because my owner wants a cat. I started to write it, and I have 10 pages on it, and I wasn't even halfway there. I realized, no, I -- I'm still really conflicted.

Maybe that's your next book.

Maybe.

Once poisoned to near-extermination in the lower 48 states, wolves made a remarkable comeback over the last two decades under protection of the Endangered Species Act. But as packs continue to multiply their taste for livestock and big game herds coveted by hunters has stoked a rising backlash.

Wildlife officials say that without public wolf hunting, they need greater latitude to eliminate problem packs. Montana and Idaho held inaugural hunts last year but an August court ruling scuttled their plans for 2010.

"As the wolf populations increase, the depredations increase and the number of wolf removals will increase. It's very logical," said Mark Collinge, Idaho director for Wildlife Services, the U.S. Department of Agriculture branch that removes problem wolves, typically by shooting them from aircraft.

"You just have to accept that part of having wolves is having to kill wolves," he said.

But wildlife advocates and animal rights groups contend the response to depredating wolves has become too heavy-handed. They say a string of court decisions in their favor underscores that the species remains at risk.

"The draconian lengths they are poised to take really are a throwback, to when the same agency was gassing wolf pups in their dens almost a century ago and setting poisoned baits and trapping them," said Michael Robinson with the Center for Biological Diversity.

At least 1,700 wolves now roam Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. There are more than 4,000 in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. New populations are taking hold in Oregon and Washington, and wolves have been sighted in Colorado, Utah and New England.

Some of the most remote wilderness habitats are becoming saturated with the animals. As a result, packs are pushing into agricultural and residential areas where domestic animals offer an easy meal.

One of the more extreme proposals -- burying wolf pups in their dens and then poisoning them with carbon monoxide gas -- would be used only infrequently, in cases where the rest of the pack had been killed for preying on livestock, officials said.

More established practices, including shooting wolves from the air and ground, would be expanded.

In Montana and Idaho, officials hope to revive hunting seasons by rebranding them as "conservation hunts" or "research hunts." Also, Montana Democrat U.S. Senator Max Baucus wants ranchers to have more freedom to shoot wolves harassing livestock.

A novel, non-lethal approach to wolf control is being considered in Idaho, according to a Department of Agriculture proposal. After being surgically sterilized, pairs of wolves would be radio-collared and released -- "to maintain and defend their territory against other wolf packs that might be more likely to prey on livestock."

Killing marauding wolves is nothing new in some parts of their range: In the Northern Rockies, more than 1,400 have been killed by wildlife agents and ranchers since the first 66 wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in the mid-1990s.

But Wisconsin and Michigan in the past avoided wolf killings, instead relocating plundering animals or taking defensive measures such as fencing in livestock. Under applications pending with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the states want new authority to remove up to 10 percent of their wolves annually, equal to about 110 wolves a year.

Government statistics back up critics' claims that wolves account for a small proportion of livestock losses caused by predators. They kill fewer sheep and cattle than coyotes, bears, mountain lions or even dogs.

Yet where packs get onto ranchlands, the results can be brutal for both wolves and livestock. That was illustrated in a string of recent cattle killings and reprisals outside the small town of Ennis, Mont.

Since late July, at least six ranches near Ennis have suffered cattle killings by a wolf group known as the Horse Creek pack, which lives at the base of the Gravelly mountains.

Within two weeks of the first calf being killed, wolf specialists with Wildlife Services killed two adult members of the Horse Creek pack in hopes of deterring the others.

One was shot on July 29 and the second on Aug. 6 -- just a day after U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in Missoula, Mont. ordered the region's wolves back onto the endangered species list.

After the attacks continued and several more calves died, state officials on Aug. 12 ordered the entire pack removed. Another calf was found dead on Aug. 13, and two on Aug. 17.

Two more Horse Creek wolves were shot.

On Aug. 18, three more calves turned up dead, bringing the total dead livestock to at least a dozen.

The remaining four members of the pack remained at large late last week. But there was little doubt they would be killed, said Carolyn Sime, Montana's lead wolf biologist

"When we authorize it, we're confident they're going to get it done," she said.

Rancher Jerry Dickinson said the Horse Creek pack killed at least three calves worth a combined $2,400 on the Granger ranch, which he manages.

Their carcasses were found on the Beaverhead National Forest, where the calves had been grazing. Others have disappeared without a trace.

"If they take that pack out, we've bought ourselves maybe two or three years until another pack establishes itself," Dickinson said. "Eventually another bunch of wolves will move in there and we'll get the same problem all over."

"Ooh! How do you play?" I asked, delighted not to be sent into traffic.

"Well, you put your hand out, see?" He grabbed my hand, palm down, spread my fingers wide. "Then someone takes a switchblade, and goes here, here, here." He mimed stabbing at the space between my fingers. "And then you go faster and faster until, whoops!" He pantomimed lopping my pinky finger off, laughing quite maniacally as I swiped my hand back.

Eventually I learned not to play with Daddy.

He could be warm and funny when he felt like it. He could explode with rage when stewed in the right combination of Milwaukee's Best and whiskey. Over time, I learned to leave him to his territory, the living room recliner and the television. He owned time as well. There was a 60-second interval every weeknight at 7:30 that was his possession, generously leased to the Ohio Pick 3 Lottery.

"Be quiet, dammit!" he'd shout to all of us at 7:29, even if no one was speaking. The dog might be panting or my cat might linger too long, tail waving listlessly in front of the screen. "Out of the way, Jesus H. Christ!" The dog would balk, but the cat could still glare with dignity down her sharp feline nose.

As the Lotto jingle signaled the beginning of the drawing, he'd frantically shush us. The woman who called the drawing nightly welcomed viewers: "Good evening. This is the Ohio Lottery!" She had enthusiasm, gave the ritual a bit of flair.

"Damned bitch!" he'd yell, after the digits were called.

Almost without exception, he claimed to be one number off, a single number away from a win. Perhaps there was a conspiracy, weighted balls set to ensure the fewest winners. My father had figured the numbers -- a system worked out on a tick-tack-toe board with digits drawn the night prior, and then numbers from other nights of the same date years ago. He had stacks of worn lottery booklets covered in tables itemizing the history of the Ohio Lottery. It was like a Poor Richard's Almanac designed to guarantee indigence.

But on occasion he'd win. Most often the reward was $41.50. It took me until adolescence to realize that sum was likely sunk back into the Ohio Lottery within a few days. Once he won a few hundred dollars and came home like new nobility. He called me to him, "You see this?" It was a one-hundred-dollar bill. "Just look at this. You'll probably never see another one of these."

Things fell apart in our house. Walls cracked as the foundation sunk, water stains grew on ceilings as leaks accumulated from above. None of these material changes could capture his attention like this 7:30 observance.

Like so many other things, our dog began to deteriorate. She was 19 years old, and her hind legs could no longer maintain the weight of her body. My mother would carry her up and down the front stairs of the house and set her down in the yard in lieu of a walk. Sometimes she couldn't hold her bowels until being toted outside.

"The damned dog messed herself again," my father would bark, louder than the old pup herself could manage. It was obviously my mother's task to deal with cleanup.

Finally, I begged my mother to take the dog to the vet. We couldn't afford the regular veterinarian, but the ASPCA would help you out if you were low-income. After a few hours, my parents returned home. I was a teenager, and had likely spent the intervening time listening to music and writing bad poetry.

"Where's Ginger?" I asked, proving with my innocence that I was still very much a child.

My mother took a deep breath, "Honey, they had to put her to sleep." Mom had grown up on a farm. She understood the cycle of things. She said it gently to me, patting my arm.

I was inconsolable. Furious. "You let them kill her! I didn't even get to say goodbye!" I was sobbing. Crossing my arms over my knees, I cried into my sleeve.

"We loved that dog, you know that." I heard a broken, choked voice I didn't recognize coming out of my father. Opening my eyes and looking up, I saw him standing in front of me, now between me and my mother, tears rolling in streams down his face.

I'd never seen my father cry. I had imagined he was impervious to tender emotion.

"We didn't want this to happen, she was just so sick." His voice cracked. I stared at him as though I'd just discovered a new species of man. "I'm so sorry." He put an arm around me. I couldn't remember his hugging me before in my life. He patted my back and hiccupped a little. Entirely confounded, I cried harder. My dog was dead -- and something very strange had overtaken my father.

Years passed, and the hostile, more malicious form of my father receded a bit. In my early 20s, he sobered up. There was no finding God, or AA meetings. He simply came very close to drinking himself to death and determined he'd rather go for the alternative.

But the expressive, remorseful man I saw the day our dog died also never reemerged. I wasn't sure what to do with my new, sober father. He shared tics with the previous drunken version. He still had an impossibly short fuse, still went to the bar every afternoon (now had ginger ale), still figured his numbers on neat half-sheets of paper and, most nights, swore savagely at 7:30.

Sometime during his first year of sobriety, my mother called me at college. My 17-year-old cat, Princess, was dying. If I wanted to see her again before she moved on, I should come home.

Packed into my boyfriend's hatchback and cruising home, I couldn't help marveling at how long my cat had held out. She'd only been a kitten the first time I'd considered running away from home (I'd stayed because she wouldn't let me close her in the suitcase). It struck me then as strange, just how long animals lived when tended to by my family.

When I got home, Princess was underneath my bed. I lifted the edge of the comforter and saw her peering at me from the darkness. Her green eyes glowed a bit. I called, but it seemed she couldn't move. I reached, and eventually got two hands around her matted, skeletal frame.

She had withered. Her pink tongue hung forgotten between her jaws. All over her body, fur was mashed and wadded with feline dandruff. Scabs dotted her exposed skin. Across her face, a mass of cobwebs and dried mucus netted from her ears to her nose.

She was a pathetic, broken animal. I had gotten her at an age when all a little girl wants is to be a princess, to be cared for like a princess. I'd had tea parties with her. Watched her nurse kittens. Carted her around the house under my arm through most of my childhood. Once I reached my teenage years, I'd somewhat forgotten her. Boys were far more exciting than a cat. Then, when I'd had the opportunity to move out and go to school, I'd done so with no thought for my aging pet.

Emanating from her chest was a rattling sound. It was something like a purr, something like a death knell.

I carried her out to the kitchen, looking for something to clean her face. I wet a paper towel and gently began mopping back the dried muck around her eyes. It wouldn't budge. Kneeling beside her, I was gripped with remorse. I had neglected her by leaving her here. For the second time in my life, I sat down on the floor of my parents' house to cry over the death of an animal, preparing for the end.

"You'll never get it like that," my father said. He'd been watching me tend to Princess. Her breathing was shallow. "Here." With uncharacteristically deft movements, my father grabbed a dishrag off a nearby counter. With one hand he pinned the cat to the floor, and with the other, vigorously rubbed at her skull. He went at it the way I'd occasionally seen my mother Brillo pad the stovetop.

"Dad! Stop!" I cried, but he kept it up. The rag entirely covered Princess' face. I was certain he was suffocating her.

"There," he said, and he let her go. "Better just to get it all over and done with, then let her be." The cat collapsed, her neck a valley between her shoulders. With eyes now free of debris, she blinked up at my father. She looked somewhat violated, but her dim eyes also appeared a little thankful.

I looked up at my dad. I'd been raised by that man's rough, unyielding hand. When I'd sometimes needed gentleness, I had more often gotten belligerence, or shouted orders to be silent. But I'd been cared for in the only way he knew.

My eyes veered down to my shrunken, half-dead cat. She'd kept me here. When I was small and scared of my father, she'd comforted me. She had been my companion and had taught me how to care for another living thing. I ran a hand over her scab-crusted coat, her now clean face.

Princess flattened herself to the ground, allowing her chin to rest on the linoleum. As I whispered variations on, "It's OK, little kitty," I felt my father lean down and kiss me on the top of the head as he left the room.

I'd known about Marc Hauser's Canine Cognition Lab, and others like it, for years. I was trained as a research psychologist myself, though my own experimental subjects were undergraduates enrolled in introductory psych. (It's much easier to find undergrads to experiment on, and they don't usually shed.) Still, I was fascinated by work done by Hauser, Brian Hare, Frans de Waal and others on animal cognition. Animals, it appeared, could learn from each other's experiences. They had a sense of fairness: If you rewarded one dog for a trick but not another, the second dog would stop obeying. Such studies were beginning to break down the long-held belief that there was something qualitatively unique about human cognition and to suggest, intriguingly and controversially, that our sense of morality may have roots in evolution.

It certainly sounded plausible to me. As an advice columnist for the Boston Globe, I am constantly asked questions about territory disputes, mating rituals and conflict resolution. The more I learned about animal psychology and evolution, the more I realized that, regardless of species, we are all trying to solve the same social problems: finding a mate, becoming good at what we do, defending our personal space, figuring out whom we can trust and whom we can't. Etiquette, I came to realize, didn't begin in the sitting room, but in the savannah. We may be the only species that has words for concepts such as fairness, reciprocity, deference, cooperation and deception, but we certainly aren't the only ones who practice them.

Besides my intellectual interest in animal cognition, I also have a high-energy terrier mix with an insatiable appetite for novel experiences and chicken tidbits. So when the Harvard Canine Cognition Lab put out a call for volunteer subjects, I couldn't wait to sign Milo up.

Why study dogs and not monkeys? Because increasing evidence showed that while primates could solve problems better, dogs have a much better grasp of how humans think than even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, do. Dogs, for example, know that if you point at one bucket but not the other, the one you pointed at is probably the one with food in it. Chimps, not so much. I'd even cited such studies in my book as evidence of the long history of the dog-human bond. (Full disclosure: I also work part-time at Harvard Business School, which is not affiliated in any way with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' psychology department, where the study was conducted.)

Milo and I were eventually called for two separate sessions at the lab. The basic protocol of all the experiments was the same. The owner (henceforth referred to as "I," since I am no longer an academic and therefore not obligated to write as though I don't exist) holds the dog ("Milo") between her ("my") knees. Milo is facing two buckets, sometimes with a barrier in front of them so that he cannot see them. A treat is placed surreptitiously in one bucket, and some kind of clue -- a motion on the part of the experimenter, a video clip, a picture on the bucket -- is given to the dog. Then the experimenter makes a gesture (in the two sessions we were in, either bowing the head or kneeling and bowing the head) at which point I release Milo.

The question is: Does the clue lead him to the right bucket?

Of course it bloody doesn't, he's a dog. His notion of cause and effect is immediate. He's not responding to what you did 30 or even 10 seconds ago, he's responding to the very last thing he experienced. Which was the signal to me to release him.

And the problem is, there is no such thing as a neutral human gesture where dogs are concerned. Even if you make a motion they don't understand, they will try to figure it out -- particularly Milo, which makes my evening yoga practice a challenge. And a human lowering his or her head and avoiding eye contact is not a neutral signal to dogs. Talking to other dog-owning friends, I learned that a neighbor's dog refused to approach the experimenters, because she had been well taught by her owners not to go near strangers who are acting funny. The dog of an emotionally sensitive friend turned out to be equally emotionally sensitive, and climbed in the lap of the apparently depressed lab assistant and tried to cheer her up. Milo, who gets experimented on a lot at home, assumed that the lab techs were trying to teach him a trick, and avoided the buckets entirely and scratched at the experimenters' legs so that they would show him again.

The experiments are based, you see, on the notion of giving a dog information and then setting it free to figure out how to best use that information. This might work with primates, but it's not how most dogs are socialized. Unless you have a high-level working dog, you generally do not want a dog to solve problems on their own. The last time Milo solved a problem on his own, we had taken him out on a rowboat and he didn't like being that close to the water. His solution was to jump out of the rowboat. Dogs aren't good independent problem-solvers; if they were, they'd still be wolves. They're good at replicating behavior they've been rewarded for in the past. Milo did brilliantly on the experiments in which people pointed to a bucket with their hands or feet, because he's been trained to. I've trained him so well to look where I point my feet, in fact, that when I dropped a glob of guacamole on my foot itself, I couldn't get him to notice it; he keep sniffing the floor in front of my toes. The experiments Milo and I participated in didn't reveal any information about how Milo thinks. They only showed what kind of behavior he'd been rewarded for in the past.

Marc Hauser isn't up on charges of designing bad experiments; unfortunately, you can't really get in trouble for that. (Instead, he's on academic leave following concerns about his research on primates.) But it's as though these experiments were designed by someone who didn' t know dogs at all. The very thing they were testing for -- the social sensitivity of dogs -- invalidated, as far as I could tell, many of the experiments' results.

One of the major goals of dog-cognition research is to figure out if dogs have a capacity known as "theory of mind." Theory of mind refers to the ability to understand that other people (or dogs) have a mind of their own, and are guided by the information and intentions they have. Children develop theory of mind around 4 years of age -- that's when they become able to lie convincingly, and understand that if Sally leaves the room and you hide her crayons, when she returns, she'll look for them the last place she saw them.

It's hard to test for theory of mind in an animal that can't speak, but there's some indication that dogs might have it (for example, dogs won't beg from a person who is blindfolded, presumably because they know the person can't see them). If dogs can be shown to have theory of mind, it would reveal important information about the effects of domestication on cognition, and possibly help develop better training protocols for guide dogs, or even diagnostic tests or teaching techniques that can be used for non-verbal people with developmental disabilities.

Hauser's experiments convinced me that the lab, at least so far, is not the place to test for such things. Imagine if you were to be tested on your social skills -- at a Japanese tea ceremony, a quinceañera, a Super Bowl party or some other situation utterly beyond your cultural ken. Would you easily divine the intentions and desires of others, or would you have a minor meltdown and start humping people's legs just trying to figure out what was going on?

Of course you would.

A few weeks after our first session at the Canine Cognition Lab, I got a chance to test Milo's theory of mind at home. I was dog sitting his best friend Hermione, to whom Milo was deferential. I started tossing treats to the dogs, either calling them by name or making eye contact before I threw the treat. Milo would not go after a treat that I'd intended for Hermione, even if it landed closer to him. If Hermione saw or sniffed her treat and rejected it (poodles are like that sometimes), then he would eat it, but only if he knew for sure that she'd decisively shown no interest. If she didn't appear to see the treat, and it was intended for her, he wouldn't eat it.

In other words, he was gauging, mostly by eye direction:

1. Who I wanted the treat to go to, and

2. Whether or not Hermione knew she had been given a treat.

Maybe this sounds like nothing more than a cute dog story, but to a psychologist, it's a lot more. If my observations were correct, Milo was applying his theory of mind both to a human and another dog at the same time.

And it's highly unlikely you could replicate that situation in a lab. The nature of science is replicability, keeping things as neutral and context-free as possible; that is not the nature of dogs. Nothing is neutral when you are a dog.

Psychology in the 21st century strives mightily to be a science and has made some remarkable breakthroughs as such. But why fetishize the lab, the replicable experiment, as the be-all and end-all of research, if the subject matter -- or the subjects themselves -- aren't amenable to it? Many breakthroughs in developmental and clinical psychology were made by careful attention to individuals. Piaget famously kept extensive diaries on his own children. In this age of Flip cameras and YouTube, it would be easy enough to ask dog owners to videotape their dogs at home in particular situations, and then post the videos for experimenters to evaluate. Do social scientists really want the best data they can get, or do they want, more than that, the trappings of the hard sciences?

Me, I'm out of the game. I'll settle for the bumper sticker.

Robin Abrahams is the author of the book "Miss Conduct's Mind Over Manners: Master the Slippery Rules of Modern Ethics and Etiquette" and an advice columnist for the Boston Globe.

That is the paradox raised by the extraordinary story of Mary Bale, the now-notorious "cat-bin woman." On Saturday, Bale, age 45, was walking down a street in Coventry, a city in the county of West Midlands in England, when she happened upon Lola, a 4-year-old tabby cat minding her own business. As captured by closed-circuit television, Bale first pets Lola, and then, for reasons that will probably never be fully clear either to herself or to the rest of the world, picks the cat up by the scruff of the neck, pops open the top of a nearby trash bin, and deposits the poor feline inside. Looking for a glimpse of the darkness that resides inside the soul of every human? Watch the video. It's not pretty.

According to the Daily Mail, the cat's owner, Darryl Mann, heard Lola meowing from inside the bin some 15 hours later. After inspecting footage from his own security cameras, he posted the video of the woman and the cat to a Facebook group. Cue: Viral video madness.

Now the whole world hates Mary Bale. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have weighed in, and its safe to say that Bale doesn't have a whole lot of fans. Death threats are flying around the Internet. The police have stationed guards at her home. Bale told the Daily Mail, "I did it as a joke because I thought it would be funny." She doesn't think it's so funny now.

It is not clear to me from the press coverage whether the police identified Bale on their own or whether the culprit was nailed by someone watching the footage on Facebook. But regardless, the lesson is the same: Video surveillance is a fact of public life, the ability to transfer that video to a distribution platform accessible to the entire computer-connected world is now absurdly trivial, and the emergence of social networks as powerful as Facebook means flash mobs can rise up in an instant's notice to vent their rage far and wide over whatever transgression has most recently captured their Twitter-induced ADHD imagination.

Does this constitute progress?

If, as a result of all this cat-bin lady furor, society registers a drop in the number of incidents involving trash cans and innocent pets, maybe some good will come out of all this. Certainly, the proliferation of amateur video has proven to be a significant, and growing, check against the kind of police abuses that were once committed routinely without any fear of reprisal. But there's still something spooky about our transformation into an everybody-watching-everybody-else-all-the-time society. Fifteen years ago, Darryl Mann would have found his cat in a trash can, been consumed with rage at the anonymous idiot who committed this terrible insult to the feline sensibility (or, more likely simply assumed it was an accident), and that would have been that. Yes, Mary Bale would have continued merrily on her way, free to inflict her reign of garbage-receptacle terror on the rest of Coventry's undeserving pets, and that would have been too bad. But I'm not overly infatuated with the alternative scenario either, in which every publicly visible human foible becomes viral video grist for the free-floating rage of a billion strangers.

But I guess we'll just have to get used to it. I don't think we're going back.

Hardly a week goes by without a heavily recirculated news story about a zoo animal, pet or wild creature attacking a human. You've all stumbled across these videos or news stories or had them e-mailed to you out of the blue. The woman getting mauled by a chimpanzee. The shark expert getting bitten while filming a TV special. A teenager getting bitten on the legs by a panda at the Beijing zoo. Werner Herzog's film "Grizzly Man," a documentary about the life of environmentalist Timothy Treadwell -- a fascinating man, to be sure, but one whose life may not have interested quite so many people had he not been mauled to death.

Why the obsession? Strictly speaking, animals don't pose a serious threat to almost anyone anymore. The majority of the human race lives in thoroughly settled areas, and has for well over a century. And those who live closer to nature, or in nature, still don't have much to worry about. It's not as if someone living within a few miles of a national forest, or even in the middle of the Amazon rain forest, has to worry about vicious predators leaping into their windows at night and chowing down on their families. Compared to, say, dying in a car accident or getting cancer, the odds of getting bitten or clawed or otherwise attacked by any sort of creature are minuscule. Fear of getting bitten by a cranky neighborhood pit bull that slips its leash might be more reasonable than fear of being devoured by a great white or torn apart by baboons, but even violence by domesticated animals isn't a terribly rational fear in the greater scheme of things. There are more mundane threats worth dreading.

My theory: The fear and fascination with deadly animals is from a mix of guilt and rationalization. As a species we feel guilt (even though we may not recognize it as such) about having almost completely subdued every other species on the planet. And we rationalize this dominance by giving tales of animal-related mayhem a disproportionate amount of attention, and presenting them in Manichaean terms, as if we were a bunch of Victorian English people reveling in horrifying stories of tigers mauling native porters on the banks of the Ganges or rogue elephants impaling Christian missionaries during a stampede. The human race's fixation on such tales (especially now, with virgin forest disappearing and the oceans being treated as dumpsters) sends a number of messages, few of them healthy or sensible.

One is that it is not truly possible for humans to peacefully coexist with nature, and it's even less likely that people can domesticate once-wild creatures, so we shouldn't pay too much attention to stories about the damage we're inflicting on natural habitats or the species we're wiping out through development. That which is not human is potentially a threat, this mentality says -- and even if you think an animal is peaceful or domesticated or otherwise not dangerous, you're naive.

Bottom line: Humanity's absolute dominance of the non-human world is justified, because if things weren't this way, we'd all be prey, just as in primitive times. (I can think of no better illustration of this notion than this video of two dogs ripping the bumper off a police car. "I'd get out quickly and empty a mag on those mad dogs," wrote a commenter, "but that's maybe why I'm not a cop.")

One of the more vivid illustrations of the "Do it to nature before nature does it to you!" mind-set is a subcategory of online videos showing naturalists, trainers or people who have chosen to keep wild animals as pets getting attacked by creatures that are theoretically not as vicious as their reputations suggest, or that are in captivity (or "trained") and therefore supposedly peaceable.

For instance, the above-linked clip of a shark expert getting bitten has an "I told you so" element that verges on black humor -- as evidenced by its comments thread, which contains  a lot of self-righteous chortling. "It shows you the 'expert' is full of crap," wrote a commenter. "That is the real lesson here." This clip of a Polish bear trainer being attacked during a TV appearance inspired similar quips. ("What do humans expect," wrote one commenter, "a bear, a wild animal, NOT to attack someone?") This clip of a lion attack is prefaced by an announcer telling us that the incident occurred in Pakistan, "a country where it's legal to keep exotic animals as pets." Great idea, Pakistan!

Also worth noting is the evolution of the "animals-on-the-warpath" film. The gold standard for this sort of entertainment is still Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," based on Peter Benchley's novel. The post-1975 hysteria over sharks can be largely attributed to the box-office success of Spielberg's film, and Benchley, who died in 2006, later said that he regretted writing the book because it demonized creatures whose complexity and intelligence are only now beginning to be understood. The plot is loosely modeled (no, really!) on Henrik Ibsen's play "An Enemy of the People," about a heroic doctor fighting self-interested officials and businesspeople to close a local tannery that's contaminating local waters. The hero of "Jaws," Chief Brody, endures a milder version of such opposition when he tries to close Amity Island's beaches to prevent further casualties from shark attacks. Both book and film make it clear that civilization's blithe arrogance is the root cause of shark attacks -- that such attacks became more common with the advent of seaside resorts and recreational swimming, which encroached on the animals' territory, disrupted their feeding patterns, and supplied them with lots of new kicking-and-splashing entrees to consider.

But that's not what audiences took away from "Jaws." What they got from it was, "Sharks like to eat people, so don't go in the water." Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.

"Jaws" inspired rip-offs about wild animals purposefully stalking and devouring humans, including "Orca," "Tentacles" and "Grizzly." The subgenre was part horror movie, part disaster film, playing equally to humanity's innate, primordial terror of other predators, and a collective fear that by carrying on as if we were the globe's invincible alpha dogs, we should not be surprised to experience a bit of push-back (and that, in the end, we'd reassert our primacy by destroying the animal that aimed to destroy us). 

The two modes, horror and disaster, began dovetailing in the 1950s in pictures that played on fear of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, generally; radiation mutated "normal" beasts and turned them into voracious, gigantic super-predators.

The tradition continued post-"Jaws" with a curious variation on the formula. Starting in the late '70s we started to see films about people being menaced by animals that were faster, smarter and more bloodthirsty than their real-world equivalents, while still being recognizably animals rather than uncategorizable "monsters."

Some films in this vein offered 1950s-style mea culpas for the rampaging creatures. For instance, the disfigured bear attacking campers in "Prophecy" was mutated by industrial pollution, and the arachnid swarm in "The Giant Spider Invasion" was the fault of pesticides. Other post-"Jaws" animal thrillers took a "Frankenstein" approach; the title creatures in the original "Piranha," for instance, are made meaner and tougher by military science run amok, and the super-smart, razor-toothed predators in "Deep Blue Sea" are the product of top-secret experiments to grow stem cell samples by implanting human brain tissue in the brains of sharks (or something like that). The creatures in these films are still physically similar to actual grizzlies, spiders, piranhas and sharks. But they've been amped up, tricked out and otherwise made badder.

Still other films in this vein show familiar species possessing powers far beyond what any naturalist would verify, yet they feel no need to explain how those powers came to be. For instance, the title creatures in "Anaconda" and its sequel, "Anacondas," are much larger than the jungle snakes you know from biology texts, and more monster-like, too, basically sea serpents that can exist on land as well. They're as long as city buses, have heads the size of truck tires, and can leap from the water like dolphins and enfold supporting characters an an instantaneous death grip. ("Eeet wraps its coils around you, and holds you tighter than any lover," intones Jon Voight's Peruvian snake hunter. "And then you have the pleasure of feeling your bones break ... and your veins eeesplode!")

What all these animal-disaster flicks have in common is an unstated conviction that nature by itself is not quite frightening enough to sustain a contemporary two-hour movie. The animals have to be augmented somehow, made bigger and faster, smarter and hungrier -- because how else to level the playing field against human foes?

Preposterous as they are, such narratives are of a piece with the fascination over real-world animal attacks by wild creatures in nature or in captivity, and tales of supposedly "domesticated" pets that turn on their owners (the p.c. word now is "companion") and take off a finger or an ear. These stories are presented out of context, oversimplified, exaggerated, sometimes pumped up with the hot air of showmanship.

But the purpose is always the same: to titillate and terrify, and to reassure us that the world as it is -- humans on top, everything else beneath our boot heel -- is inevitable and right, and not too different from how animals would treat us if, God forbid, the tables were ever turned.