Oh, how things can change in just two decades, especially in a nation that includes about 90 million dogs among its residents — everything from beloved pets to working dogs doing all kinds of tasks, from sniffing out drugs in airports to assisting blind people with crossing a street. Today, Horowitz is a senior research fellow at Barnard College in New York City, where her specialty is dog cognition: understanding how dogs think, including the mental processes that go into tasks such as learning, problem-solving and communication. Dog cognition is now a widely respected field, a growing specialty branch of the more general animal-cognition research that has existed since the early 20th century.

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