Even at the tender age of not-quite-2, Orly is taking her role as the steward of family culture seriously.

Last week, while we were dog-sitting for Orly and Dotty’s new best friends (Stella and Cruiser), Orly thought to leverage an opportunity to hand down Hogle Golden Retriever Culture and Wisdom: She taught Dotty how to pick raspberries.

Berry picking is a revered part of the culture of all Hogle goldens. Jana created this family talent as a young puppy in Israel. She started with strawberries, very quickly learning that the red, sweet-smelling ones tasted better than the green, hard ones. Thus began a daily competition for the finest berries. I usually lost.

Strawberry season in the Israeli garden fed into blackberry season. Jana perfected the art of plucking the ripest, sweetest berries — while avoiding the thorns. We made a deal: Anything above her nose height belonged to me. Anything lower belonged to her.

That deal survived a move to the US, and endured through blueberry picking in Massachusetts. Jana conveyed the cultural knowledge to Cali in California, ensuring it would continue through the next generation — now with raspberries.

Cali perfected raspberry picking over several summers in Montana, teaching the art to young Orly. In one glorious summer, just a year ago, Cali and Orly gorged on raspberries and blackberries. They got a little carried away, though, and might have … destroyed the raspberry bushes in the process.

Never mind. Following some landscaping work, new berry bushes will be ready to fill dog tummies by summer 2024.

Imagine Orly’s delight, then, to discover raspberry bushes at Stella and Cruiser’s house!

Not being goldens, Stella and Cruiser had no idea of their good fortune.

Orly took Dotty firmly in paw, led her to the patch, and … Dotty was a star student, picking up on the technique right away, thus ensuring that the cultural tradition would extend to a fourth generation.

Dotty even remembered and was able to apply her new skill in a different environment: Several days after we got home, Dotty remembered that there were raspberry bushes next to the river trail, and immediately headed to them, nosed around, picked and devoured the few remaining berries.

While it used to be controversial to say that non-humans shared culture in their social groups, Jane Goodall identified dozens of shared and taught behaviors among chimpanzees that, she pointed out, constituted culture. Now, many researchers agree that agree that culture “involves a collective adoption and transmission of one or more behaviors among a group” or a pattern of “knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations” — and that multiple animal species demonstrate cultural knowledge and sharing.