They got a new dog. Yeah, a little Portuguese water dog.

But I think there’s a better approach than trying to motivate yourself with the human equivalent of canine obedience training.

A person bitten by a dog as a child, for instance, might be able to overcome a canine phobia if the old memory can be replaced with a less scary one.

"You could get yourself a weiner dog that goes berserk from oil, but weiner dogs go berserk about anything, so it would be hard to tell," he joked.

His team have tried to find such behavior in dogs -- like whether a dog can learn a dog-human ball game by watching -- but found none.