Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Inside the Mind of a Dog’ on Netflix, the Canine-Brain Documentary That’s as Fascinating as it Sounds

Netflix has now officially both-sides’d this eternally contentious debate: Inside the Mind of a Dog comes two years after Inside the Mind of a Cat debuted, and it’s obvious the two documentaries were released in the order of pet superiority. Not that anyone’s anti-dog around here – it’s a universal truth that dogs are amazing, and I’ve been owned by a couple, but not nearly as amazing as the noble feline in terms of human companionship. (It’s also just fine to like both, as long as cognitive dissonance is, like, totally your bag, man.) Anyway: Mind of a Dog boasts Rob Lowe as narrator, and takes an analytical approach to its topic while also meeting our USDA-dictated daily nutritional requirements for frolicking puppy action and slo-mo shots of dogs sky-highing for frisbees. It’s gonna be a hit for Netflix, I’m sure.

INSIDE THE MIND OF A DOG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: You know, nobody batted an eye when John Wick murdered eight percent of the population after bad guys killed his dog. The general consensus was that he was wholly justified in his actions, and his motive for such extreme violence was easily the most plausible part of the entire film. Humanity’s love of dogs was thus reaffirmed, and further justifies the existence of a documentary like Inside the Mind of a Dog, which seeks to answer a bunch of questions you may have about your beloved Rover and Lil Nummynums: How smart are they, anyway? Do they experience emotion? What’s so special about their sense of smell? And – sniffle – does your dog actually LOVE you?

We begin with a brief history of dogs, which, genetically speaking, are all 99.9 percent wolf, whether they’re handsome huskies or ridiculous yorkies. Domestication began when primitive man began leaving behind food scraps – or “yummy garbage,” in the words of a talking head here – that wolves liked to snack on, and they became our pals (note: Netflix’s next doc should be about the crazy diversity of dog breeds). “Survival of the friendliest,” is what the experts call it, and it’s a great turn of phrase. We learn the science behind Puppy Dog Eyes, and that every dog nose is different, with a distinct “print” just like human fingers. Neat!

From there, the doc goes in depth into the training of service dogs as an entry point to examining what goes on inside Poochie’s skull. We follow a few dogs – e.g. good golden boy Bonus and mellow black-labbish fella Peabody – through the training process, and witness varying degrees of what appears to be torturous teasing for the purposes of teaching discipline: Dropping a piece of sumptuous-looking steak right in front of the pup and not letting him eat it, dumping a crateful of tennis balls on the floor while the dog’s trying to sniff out a specific item, stuff like that. Factoids are thrown at us like Orel Hershiser fastballs: Translations of different banks and tail wags. Dogs are trained to interrupt anxiety. They have 16 different facial expressions, and have adopted some from their human pals. Their hearing is four times more sensitive than ours, and their olfactories – oh geez, their olfactories! They smell in 3D. They can SMELL cancer. They can smell our moods, for crying out loud! Which means they can smell our love, right? Sure seems like it. And reciprocate, yes? NO SPOILERS!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Too bad Netflix isn’t transparent with its numbers, or else we’d be privy to the Mind of a Dog/Mind of a Cat streaming wars, but alas. As for related viewing, Netflix docuseries The Hidden Lives of Pets peruses similar subject matter. And then we’re prompted to wonder what’s next – Inside the Mind of a Horse? Inside the Mind of a Gerbil? Inside the Mind of a Goldfish? How will you ever know if your aquarium snail LOVES you if Netflix doesn’t make a documentary about it? The sky’s the limit!

Performance Worth Watching: Peabody’s my dawg. His trainer takes him to a sensory-overload amusement park and the boy flops over and literally snores right through all the screaming-rollercoaster-funnel cake pandelerium. That’s a legit superpower, bro.

Memorable Dialogue: “Bonus’s favorite way of interacting is butt scratches. That really gets him going.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: OF COURSE the Canine Cognition Center and “puppy kindergarten” are located at Duke University, because See Spot Run Run Spot Run Community College would’ve been too on the nose. Human brains at Harvard are also featured here, further asserting Mind of a Dog as a doc that leans into the science, and away from touchy-feely whimsy – and it’s all the better for it. Sure, cuteness is unavoidable, because even the ugliest pooches are totes adorbs, whether they’re sniffing butts and chasing tails, or in the serious business of sniffing out people trapped under earthquake rubble or waking people with PTSD in the midst of harrowing nightmares. 

The documentary isn’t all business, however. One of the payoffs of a relatively in-depth look at service-dog training methods (and the thoughtful behavioral analysis that spins out of that) is a sequence where the freshly trained dogs are paired with their owners, which puts your cockles in the microwave and presses the nuke button. At a brisk 75 minutes, the film is concise and informative, but doesn’t answer every question we might have – say, whether there’s a success rate for dogs sniffing out ailments like Parkinson’s or diabetes, or if service-dog owners just have to get used to having slobber on their door latches and light switches. (The film doesn’t get into the drool.)

And yes, of course your dog loves you. That spoiler bit earlier was a joke. You already knew that, and you didn’t need this movie to use science to affirm that, even though it does, convincingly. Rather, you’ll learn plenty of other things about dogs and how they interact and communicate with humans, and that’s the whole point of this engaging and fascinating doc.

Our Call: Dog lovers’ tails will wag wildly in a polyrhythmic whole-butt-wiggling manner while watching Inside the Mind of a Dog. Which of course translates roughly to STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.