For the Love of a Dog (8 page)
Read For the Love of a Dog Online
Authors: Ph.D., Patricia McConnell
As useful as empathy is, it can also be the road to trouble. Inaccurate guesses about what’s going on in the mind of another individual have ruined many a marriage, and have confused the relationship between
no small number of dogs and their owners. I’ve had clients tell me that their dog was “angry” when they left the house, even though the dog’s visual signals were all about anxiety and fear. Some dogs who “go crazy” when visitors arrive act as though they are terrified, while other dogs similarly described are beside themselves with glee. Because it can lead to so much trouble, one can sympathize with radical behaviorists who argue that we must avoid making any “attributions” about an animal’s mental state. But ignoring an animal’s mind and emotional state in order to avoid mistakes about them is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Surely there’s a way to toss out the dirty water but keep the baby in the tub. One way to do that is to learn to distinguish between an objective description of your dog’s behavior, and a guess about what’s going on in his mind.
The first step is easy—simply start paying attention to your own descriptions of your dog’s behavior. Are they clear descriptions about exactly what your dog is doing, or are you jumping to conclusions about why your dog is behaving in a certain way? Keep a mental log of how often you describe your dog’s behavior in an objective, descriptive way (“When the doorbell rings he begins running in circles and leaping up at the door. He barks with high, rapidly repeated notes, his tail is wagging so hard his torso is wagging along with it, his eyes are sort of squinted half-shut and his mouth is open.”) versus describing what you think he’s thinking or feeling (“Oh he just loves visitors! He goes crazy when they come over”). Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not suggesting that we’re necessarily wrong when we describe what we believe about a dog’s mental state. I have every reason to believe that the dog in the description above does indeed love having visitors over. Nor am I suggesting that you sound like you’re reading from a scientific journal in your daily speech. But it’s important to be aware of the difference between a description of a behavior and your interpretation of what it means.
While you’re at it, you might do the same in your interactions with members of your own species, asking yourself how often you objectively describe someone’s behavior in your mind (“Her voice was flat; her lips smiled, but her eyes didn’t”) versus jumping right to an attribution (“She hates me”) or a judgment (“She is
such
a witch”). I suggest this not in the vein of a dog trainer/ethologist morphing into a self-help author, but because paying attention to all your social interactions
might teach you something about your interactions with dogs. One of my clients consistently interpreted her new dog’s behavior as “testing” her. With every misdeed, the dog was purportedly attempting to gain “dominance” over her and push the limits in his new home. However, every time I met the dog, he bent himself into a pretzel to keep his tail down, his head lower than his shoulders, and his mouth in a submissive grin. He behaved the same way to my client, and so I suggested that the dog bolted through the door, leaped up onto the beds, and chased the cat only because he didn’t know he shouldn’t. As I got to know his owner better, I realized that she interpreted the behavior of all her human friends in the same way. Just like her, we all have filters through which we interpret the world; be careful that yours aren’t filtering out who your dog really is.
And what about our dogs? Are they observing us and making their own interpretations? Your dog may not be conducting complicated intellectual analyses of your every move, but I suspect the well-known trainer and writer Brian Kilcommons is right when he says that dogs are brilliant at reading the emotional states of their humans. What else do they have to do all day, he asks, but watch us like hawks, taking our pulses moment by moment? “Is she happy?” your dogs might wonder. “Angry? Should I leave the room?” It makes sense that it is relevant and important to dogs to have some idea of what we, their social partners, are thinking or feeling. This does not mean that dogs lie at our feet wondering if we’re wondering what they’re wondering about. But surely it is to their advantage to understand enough about our emotions to know how they might affect the immediate future (“Uh-oh, she’s sitting at the computer and she just made that low, hissy sound she makes right before she yells that loud, yucky one. Better get up quietly and go lie down in the living room.”).
A great question to ask yourself is how your dog would describe your behavior, and what interpretation he or she might make of it. One of the most common mistakes dog owners make is assuming that their dogs “know” what they are thinking or feeling. Often that’s based on little more than a wish and a prayer, since even another human can’t
figure it out. For example, go to any dog training class in the country, and sooner or later you’ll see some gruff guy thumping his shy little Sheltie for coming when called. In a deep booming voice, he’ll say “GOOD DOG!,” slapping the Sheltie like a good ol’ boy at a bar, while the Sheltie shakes and cowers at what she interprets as a punishment.
Try putting yourself in your dog’s place for a day or two, and ask yourself how your dog would describe your behavior, if he or she could write it down. (Heaven help us if they could.) Your dog is probably a far better observer than you are—we humans pay so much attention to language that it often interferes with our ability to see what’s happening around us. A tremendously useful (and sometimes painful) way of seeing yourself through your dog’s eyes is to have someone videotape you while you interact with your dog. If you’re like most of us, you probably do things you didn’t know you did. Your dog knows what they are, but short of asking her, your best bet is to watch yourself, just the way your dog does. Every one of us performs habitual movements and has habitual expressions that our friends are more aware of than we are. And why not—who walks around with a mirror attached to his face all day long? We see ourselves from the inside out, but our friends and our dogs get an entirely different view. You can also benefit (as will your dog) by carefully watching other people around their dogs, trying to interpret the person’s actions through the eyes of a dog. Trying to watch ourselves through our dogs’ eyes will do a lot more than shed light on the behavior of our own species. It can teach us a lot about our dogs’ behavior as well, because so much of what our dogs do is in response to us.
1
I envision Tulip on the couch, looking out the living room window beside a bank of video screens, talking into her head set: “Coyote at the west gate, coyote at the west gate.”
2
Luke is gone now, having died of kidney failure, but I still love him as much as I did when he was alive, and I can’t yet bring myself to say “loved” in the past tense.
3
The inclusion of “don’t feel bad” in a sentence about feelings wasn’t planned, but it serves as a reminder of how central the emotions are to our existence.
4
They can recognize familiar faces because facial recognition is mediated by another part of the brain, but they can’t tell if the person is happy, sad, or angry without a fully functioning amygdala.
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Some people argue that while animals have these emotions, the perception of them—the actual feelings associated with anger, fear, disgust, and joy—can’t exist without consciousness. If you want to delve into an intellectual morass as sticky and opaque as molasses, jump into the debate about consciousness in nonhuman animals. We’ll do that later on in the book (remember, molasses is sweet—it’s not all bad in there), but for now, there’s value in staying with what we do know about emotions.
6
At that time I was married and had agreed to a “no more than two dogs in the house” rule. Now even the sheep-guarding dog sleeps inside. The dogs and I like it better that way, although the living room couch will never be the same.
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Binti’s keepers had been helping her learn parental skills with a stuffed animal, much as young children are taught with dolls by their parents.
8
Wolves will always feed their puppies, even if they themselves are starving. Lions eat first, letting their young starve if there’s not enough food. I love my cat more than I can say, but I wouldn’t want to count on her to risk her own life to save mine.
9
People (at least, in the West) in the 1800s had a much more accepting viewpoint of animals as thinking, feeling creatures, and romanticized descriptions of them were common.
10
The paper was accepted, although at least one reviewer objected to my “unscientific” terminology and advised I change the names to numbers. The editor, bless his heart, stood by me.
11
If you’d like an interesting and entertaining survey of how scientists vary in how they talk about emotions in animals, get a copy of Marc Bekoff’s
The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions
.
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I use the word “rages” purposefully. The process of science may be objective, but individual scientists aren’t, and disagreements between them can get heated, personal, and, on rare occasion, even physical. In one infamous incident in the seventies, someone at an academic conference threw a bucket of water in E. O. Wilson’s face for his comments linking human and animal behavior.
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In the 1880s, a horse named Clever Hans had most of Europe fooled into thinking he could do addition, multiplication, and long division until a scientist named Oskar Pfungst figured out he was using visual cues inadvertently supplied by people who knew the answer. See the references for a book about Clever Hans.
EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS
People and dogs share expressive faces,
and use surprisingly similar expressions
“He’s just fine with visitors, aren’t you, Buddy? He’s fine, really he is.” Buddy’s owners had asked me to their house to help them with their beloved Labrador Retriever, who had bitten their neighbor the week before. Barbara and Peter couldn’t understand it: Buddy was a loving family dog who doted on their children, was easily housetrained as a puppy, and was a star at obedience school. They couldn’t have loved him more, and the feeling seemed to be reciprocated. Members of the family could take away his food, pull toys out of his mouth, and trim his nails without eliciting the slightest protest. In their eyes, it seemed that the bite had come out of the blue, and although they had responded responsibly by calling in a behaviorist, deep down inside they didn’t think it would ever happen again
.
I did. Buddy may have been “fine” to them, but as I entered the house, he and I were having another, unspoken conversation. To judge by his expression, Buddy’s side went something like this: “I don’t know who you are, and I’m nervous about that. For all I know, you might be dangerous. If you stay there and don’t move forward, I’ll stay here, but if you move fast or reach your hand toward me, I’ll be forced to protect myself. I am uncomfortable, on guard, and perfectly willing to bite you.”
Of course, all that is just a bunch of words I strung together to describe my interpretation of Buddy’s emotional state and his probable behavior if I tried to pet him. I can’t possibly say exactly what was going on inside his brain, but I can make predictions about his future behavior on the basis of his expression. Rather than showing the relaxed, open mouth of a dog
who loves visitors, Buddy kept his jaw closed tight, except when his tongue flicked out in an expression of anxiety. His entire body was stiff and unmoving—in sharp contrast to the loose and flexible body of a relaxed dog. Buddy’s eyes were big and round, rather than the squinty eyes of a dog who loves company. As if that weren’t enough, Buddy was staring dead straight into my eyes, and his own eyes were as cold as ice
.
Peter and Barbara thought Buddy was “fine,” because he wasn’t barking or growling at me, but to me, Buddy had a neon sign over his head that said i am going to bite you if you get any closer. Good dog trainers and behaviorists learn to read these signals in their most subtle form, because if we don’t, we get bitten. We hate it when that happens, so we learn fast. There may be controversy about how dogs experience emotions, but there’s universal agreement that a dog’s expressions have a lot to tell us about what he’s likely to do next. As Darwin noted so long ago, many of a dog’s expressions are blindingly obvious; few people misinterpret the combination of deep growls, a snarling face, and flashing teeth. But other expressions, like the ones from Buddy, are more subtle. That doesn’t make them any less important in predicting what a dog is about to do, and the better you learn them, the more you can be proactive rather than reactive.
Some people are really good at reading their dogs’ visual signals; I have observant clients who keep dangerous dogs out of trouble because they can see their dogs tense up long before they strike out. Others—I don’t know how else to say it—are virtually illiterate in the language of dogs. The ability to read a dog’s face and posture seems to have no correlation with how much you love your dog. I’ve seen clients who were devoted to their dog, and yet while they were chatting about how their dog Lucky is cheerful 24/7, Lucky was pacing around my office with a tense, anxious face.
Differences in sensitivity to the expressions of others aren’t confined to dog owners. Not surprisingly, some of us are better than others at reading the facial expressions of members of our own species. Introverts are better at reading the expressions of others (while extroverts are more expressive themselves). According to Paul Ekman, who has been
studying facial expressions around the world for over forty years, women and men are equally adept at reading facial expressions, but there is tremendous variation between individuals of either sex. Dog trainers see the gamut, from people who read dogs like a book, to those who seem almost oblivious. This shouldn’t be surprising; even other animals vary in their ability to read faces. The primatologist Barbara Smuts described a male olive baboon who received favors from females by being especially adept at reading subtle indicators of their emotional states.
