The secret life of the dog.

This fascinating documentary looks at the important role dogs play in our lives and, more recently, in scientific study. Daniel Mills has been researching the way in which dogs look at human faces - can they really interpret our emotions in the way we often think they can? In Budapest, Adam Miklosi has shown that dog owners have a remarkable ability to understand what dogs are communicating with their different barking sounds; furthermore, wild dogs rarely bark so the dog bark as a means of communication has probably evolved specifically as part of their relationship to humans. The programme also looks at the evolutionary origin of dogs through studies into their mitochondrial DNA as well as tracing the history of canine domestication. Juliane Kaminski has been comparing the intelligence of dogs with the intelligence of chimps and it is clear that in the realm of communication, dogs surpass chimps in their ability to understand commands. Kaminski also meets a highly intelligent dog, Betsy, who can understand a vocabulary of over 300 words and whose cognitive abilities rival that of a 2-year-old child. Since 1959 Lyudmila Trut has been working on an experiment in Siberia which aims to breed a race of tame silver foxes, she describes her research, the results of which show an accelerated model of how domesticated dogs may have evolved from wolves, not just in terms of their behaviour but also in the way in which their physiological appearance has changed. Psychologist Morten Kringelbach believes that part of our attachment to dogs is due to their infantile facial features, we see his research into this. Finally, we hear how recent research into gene mutations in dogs is leading to breakthroughs in the treatment of various life-threatening medical conditions such as cardiomyopathy.