Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (46 page)

As the domestication process probably began with early canids scavenging around human groups—eating our table scraps—it is a particularly silly stance to feed dogs only raw meat, on the theory that they are wolves at heart. Dogs are omnivores who for millennia have eaten what we eat. With very few exceptions, what is good on my plate is good for my dog's bowl.

Temperament
is used to mean roughly the same thing as
personality,
without the overtone of anthropomorphism. It is perfectly acceptable to talk about a dog's personality, if we mean the dog's "usual pattern of behavior and individual traits": behavior and traits are not exclusive to humans. Some researchers use
temperament
to refer to the traits as they appear in a young animal—the genetic tendency of the dog; while reserving
personality
to refer to adult traits and behaviors, the result of that particular temperament combined with whatever they confronted in their environment.

There is no evidence, however, that any currently existing breed can lay claim to being the descendents of the original breeds. Descriptions of both the Pharaoh and Ibizan hounds cite them as the "oldest" dog breeds, which claims seemed supported by their physical resemblance to the dogs of Egyptian paintings. However, their genomes reveal them to have emerged much more recently.

The named occupation is mostly theoretical because a minority of dogs bred for work actually do the work of their breed (predominantly hunting or herding). The rest wind up either as companions sitting on our laps, or trained, trimmed, and blown-dry to be shown at "dog fancy" shows—odd, as nibbling the crusts of our sandwiches after a nice shampoo is about as far as one can get from dredging fallen waterfowl from a swamp.

Genetic analysis tests have become available since the mapping of the genome: for a fee, companies will allegedly resolve your dog's genetic code, determined from a blood sample or swab of cheek cells, into its contributing breeds. At present the accuracy of the tests is indeterminate.

What is considered
aggressive
is culturally and generationally relative. German shepherds were on the top of the list after World War II; in the 1990s Rottweilers and Dobermans were scorned; the American Staffordshire terrier (also known as the pit bull) is the current bête noire. Their classification has more to do with recent events and public perception than with their intrinsic nature. Recent research found that of all breeds,
dachshunds
were the most aggressive to both their own owners and to strangers. Perhaps this is underreported because a snarling dachshund can be picked up and stashed away in a tote bag.

Not only do dogs not typically hunt to feed themselves—whether encouraged to or not—but what hunting technique they have is, it has been noted, "sloppy." A wolf makes a calm, steady track toward his prey, without any frivolous moves; untrained dogs' hunting walks are herky-jerky, meandering back and forth, speeding and slowing. Worse, they may get waylaid by distracting sounds or a sudden urge to playfully pursue a falling leaf. Wolves' tracks reveal their intent. Dogs have lost this intent; we have replaced it with ourselves.

Notably, the number of behavioral similarities between chimpanzees and humans (culture and language aside for the moment) increases steadily as the number of scientific studies of the chimps also steadily increases.

… theoretically: no swimming pools have been used in such a test. Instead, experimenters use extremely small samples of an odorless medium, and then add an even more extremely small sample of sugar to one of them.

The psychologist Martha McClintock was the first to seriously study pheromone detection in humans; she and others have done savvy, fascinating studies of how our behavior and hormonal rates may be affected by pheromones or pheromone-like hormones. But the jury is still out—and loudly arguing—on these claims.

This construction—
strange dog
—itself seems geared to inspire fear. Its use is also based on a flawed premise: that familiar dogs will behave predictably and reliably, and unfamiliar ones will not. As we've seen, as much as we may want dogs to behave in lockstep with our desires, their simply being their own animals ensures that they will not always do so.

Research on other diseases is proceeding apace. Provocatively, dogs who live in homes with epileptics seem to be moderately good predictors of seizures. Two studies report that dogs licked the person's face or hands, whimpered, stood nearby, or moved protectively—in one case sitting
on
a child, and in another blocking a child's access to stairs—before seizures. If this is true, there may be olfactory, visual, or some other invisible (to us) cues that the dogs used. But as the data come from "self-report"—family questionnaires rather than data gathered more objectively—more evidence is needed. We can however, pause in admiration of the possibility of such a skill.

In reality, few people hear equally well across this spectrum. With age, the higher-frequency sounds, above 11–14 kilohertz, go undetected by the human ear. This knowledge prompted the inspired design of a product with the teenager's umwelt in mind. The device emits a 17 kilohertz tone—out of the range of most adults' hearing, but unpleasantly audible to youngsters. Shop owners have used it as a teenager repellent, to discourage loitering around their businesses.

Since the publication of Rico's successes, in 2004, other dogs (also border collies, for the most part) have been reported with vocabularies from eighty to over three hundred words: all names for various toys. You might have one of these prodigious vocabularians in your house.

Except when it is animated: a discarded plastic bag being tumbled down a city sidewalk by a breeze can provoke growls, caution, and occasional attacks by alarmed dogs. Dogs can be animistic, just as humans are in infancy: trying to make sense of the world by attributing a familiar quality (of life) to unknown objects. My plastic-bag-growling dog is in good company: Darwin described his own dog treating an open parasol moving in the breeze as a living thing, barking at and stalking it. And Jane Goodall has observed chimpanzees making threatening gestures toward thunderclouds. I've been known to fulminate thundercloud-ward myself.

Surprisingly, dogs mind each other's posture more than their height: dogs do not read simply being taller as being dominant or confident. As we'll see later, it's not quite right to say, as is often said of a bravely forward small dog,
he thinks he's a big dog:
Actually, he does not—he knows it is posture that matters.

The conversion to entirely digital television broadcasts will eliminate the flicker-fusion problem, making TV-viewing more viable (but no more olfactorily interesting) for dogs—who are no doubt ambivalent.

Ethologist Konrad Lorenz beautifully demonstrated this tendency of young waterfowl in the 1930s by positioning himself as that first adult creature seen by a gaggle of greylag goslings. They followed him readily, and Lorenz wound up raising the brood as his own.

Developmental psychologists rely on the fact that though infants cannot report what they are thinking, they reliably look longer at things that interest them. By using this one feature of infant behavior, psychologists gather data about what the infant can see, distinguish, and understand and what he prefers.

Well, for the most part: Kanzi the bonobo and Alex the African gray parrot are among those who have been asked and have answered: Alex was able to create and utter novel, coherent, three-word sentences based on a vocabulary built from eavesdropping on researchers; Kanzi has a multihundred-word vocabulary of lexigrams (symbolic pictures) that he can point at to communicate. And a single dog, Sofia, has been trained to use a simple eight-key keyboard concurrent with events she had already learned, like going for a walk, going into a crate, and getting food or a toy. She learned to press the appropriate key to make a request. As a communication, this behavior is closer to asking for dinner by bringing an owner an empty food bowl than it is to a full-fledged language. More abstract utterances have not been reported (nor abstract keyboards designed).

One could make an argument that this behavior was reinforced because of the survival value of looking at humans. As with infants, an adult face will hold much information, not the least of which could be where the next meal is coming from. The early-twentieth-century ethologist Niko Tinbergen similarly found that baby gulls have a strong attraction to the red-dotted beaks of adult gulls (and to any stick with a red dot placed on it by an ethologist, too).

Dogs show an additional tendency, one that people do, too, when looking at faces: to look leftward first (that is, to the right side of the face). Even young children show this "gaze bias": looking first, and longer, to the right side of an examined face. By closely observing dogs observing faces, researchers have found that dogs share this bias—when looking at human faces. When looking at other dogs, they show no gaze bias at all. Why this might be is still a matter of conjecture: perhaps we express emotions differently on each hemi-face; and perhaps dogs emote more symmetrically (lopsided ears aside). Dogs have learned to look at humans the way humans look at humans.

It should be noted that this skill is affirmed by dogs' following a pointing hand to one of two baited buckets at rates "significantly above chance." What this means is that they don't choose which bucket to search under first randomly. Instead they choose the bucket pointed at from 70 to 85 percent of the time. That's good, but they are still making the wrong judgment 15 to 30 percent of the time! Three-year-old children get the right bucket every single time. What this indicates is that the dogs' success is probably the result of a mode of understanding that is not identical to ours.

Dogs who often wind up being called
people dogs
for their keen interest in owners over dogs.

Spelling the word instead of saying it is, of course, usually futile. Dogs can also learn the connection between the cadence of a spelled word and a subsequent walk, even if the latter does not immediately follow the former. On the other hand, used in an unlikely context—say, sitting in the bath—the spelled word will not evoke much interest. Chances are slim you're about to up and take a walk when naked and sudsy.

While dogs may in fact distinguish between people behaving subtly differently, one suspects that anyone using their dogs this way might be susceptible to what psychologists call
confirmation
bias:
noticing just that part of their dog's response that supports their own theories about the person. Does the gentleman seem a bit untrustworthy to you? And yes, look how your dog growled at him once: that settles it. Dogs become amplifiers of our own beliefs; we can attribute to them that which we think ourselves.

Dogs have a preference for novel objects—
neophilia.
One study found that when asked to retrieve an unspecified toy from a pile of familiar and new toys, dogs spontaneously chose the new toys over three-quarters of the time. This penchant for the new might explain why when two dogs carrying sticks meet in a park, they often simultaneously drop the stick they've been proudly toting around in order to try to grab the pride of the approaching dog.

The dogs' ambivalence about the scent trail may at first seem surprising, given all our talk about their olfactory skills. But simply being able to smell a trail doesn't mean that they
use
this ability all the time. Often dogs need to be trained to be attentive to particular scents.

My favorite example of the child's overimitation comes from an experiment that psychologist Andrew Whiten and his colleagues ran using a locked box with a tempting piece of candy inside. They were curious if three-to five-year-old children could imitate the particular means experimenters demonstrated to unlock the box (involving twisting out rods fit through barrel openings). The children watched, captivated, and were then handed the re-locked box. Whiten found that the children almost all imitated—and the youngest children
over
imitated—twisting the rod not two or three but sometimes hundreds of times before pulling it out. What they did not yet understand was exactly what part of the (twisting) means was necessary to get the (candy-yielding) end.

Given the importance of regular visual assurances that the game is still a game, it is perhaps not surprising that successful three-way rough-and-tumble play is much rarer than play between two dogs. As with conversation, something is missed—a play signal here, an attention-getter there—when everyone is speaking at once. Typically, only dogs familiar with each other pull off threesomes.

Another indication of the dog's perception of fairness comes from a new experiment demonstrating that dogs who see another dog getting a reward for doing an act—shaking a paw on command—but who do not themselves get rewarded for the same act eventually refuse to shake anymore. (No rewarded dog was moved by the clear injustice of the situation to share his earned bounty with his unlucky partner, though …)