Dr. Chris Blazina: Good Dogs and Difficult People: What Dogs Teach Us About Love

Summary

Psychologist Dr. Chris Blazina joins host Cliff Dunning to discuss his book 'Good Dogs and Difficult People,' which argues that dogs can teach humans how to love and form healthy attachments. Starting from a 5,000-year-old Neolithic dog tomb in Orkney, Blazina traces the ancient human-canine bond and explains the science behind how dogs read our faces, smell our emotions, and trigger bonding hormones. He weaves in personal stories of childhood hardship, Meniere's disease, and a heart attack to show how dogs serve as emotional constants and models for healthier human relationships.

Key takeaways

• 1Blazina visited a roughly 5,000-year-old Neolithic tomb on Orkney where the remains of 25 dogs were found; a reconstructed dog resembles a modern border collie
• 2Humans and dogs have lived together for at least 16,000 years, possibly up to 60,000; Orkney also has a 5,000-year-old settlement with a dog kennel
• 3Dogs show a 'left gaze bias,' looking at the right side of the human face, which is less emotionally guarded; chimpanzees and possibly horses do this too
• 4Dogs have about 300 million olfactory receptors versus about 6 million in humans, and research suggests they can smell the difference between happy and stressed sweat
• 5About seven seconds of mutual eye gaze can trigger oxytocin release in both dog and human
• 6Sigmund Freud was a devoted dog owner whose dogs reportedly signaled the end of sessions; he said dogs 'love their friends and bite their enemies.' Boris Levinson, the father of animal-assisted therapy, called dogs a 'halfway station' back to nature
• 7Host Cliff Dunning briefly claims the Maya ran underground water treatment systems and theorizes that they 'terraformed' their cities to optimize human physiology

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Well, the fall weather has arrived here in Northern California. I am sitting here looking out my studio window, and it is coming down in buckets. Heavy, heavy rain. It was predicted to be a light shower. But it's far from that. And you know, I have been hearing reports about the El Nino effect, which is a heating of the water in the Pacific, down around the Baja area in Mexico. And They're warning us that we're going to have atmospheric rain storms coming this year. And that's good for a lot of people, especially in Southern California where it's very dry and they can use it. But the problem is they don't have a way to capture the water. And it tends to back up and flood the roads and flood the creeks and the rivers that go downtown. And so... You know, and this is the problem that I'm just a little perturbed at the fact that we have these heavy downpours and we don't collect the water. We just don't have a system like the Maya did of cisterns, these underground water collection systems that collected the water when it rained. And so they had some runoff and some waste. But when I first saw one of these water collection systems in Uxmal and Yucatan, I was blown away because they had basically dug a huge trench and then flattened the walls, flattened the ground and made a system. The other thing we don't really understand about the Maya is they had underground water treatment centers and they would treat the water with various minerals. And so collecting water is important, and we just don't pay enough attention to it. ...

Excerpt from Earth Ancients, Nov 4, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.